Who was the mental genius

[Michelle Sullivan]

Baptiste Daroussin wrote:
> The mental genius is me apparently (thanks for the kind words, btw) I'm
> responsible for both the pkg_install EOL message and for breaking ports tree
> with older make (btw you can recover with installing manually bmake).
>   

That is quite a task...  you can't easily (I tried) ... the way to do it
involves copying the distinfo from a late version of the ports tree for
bmake and build that (manually ensuring the version is updated in the
Makefile as well)

Also if you have systems pre-v8 (as I do) you have to do similar with
gtar and xz and then implement a little shell script in place of the
system tar to ensure if it gets a .xz archive to switch to gtar,
otherwise use the built in tar...  Then you run into issues with
compilers (Gcc 4.2) and clang33 doesn't build...  So I've got to blind
update production systems to 9.x (not worth 8.x as it's about to EOL as
well - though will upgrade through) and then hope the packages will not
break the (private) applications.. (yes they seem to work on the dev
servers, but that doesn't mean they work in productions... SORBS - Oct
2010 was proof of that - extensive testing in dev... switched it all to
production and a minor DDoS took out everything for 2 days because of a
hitherto unknown issue (one line of code in 38000+ lines had 2
parameters swapped.)

> Yes it would have been a good idea to give a warning to the user about the fact
> that the ports tree won't be support long on after EOL of 8.3, given the ports
> tree will break again quite soon after EOL of 8.4 I should think about adding
> such a message right now (btw this is not that easy in the case we are talking
> about because I have no way to differentiate a fmake with support for :tl from a
> fmake without support for :tu same goes for :tu) hence it is hard to print a
> message.
>   
Actually that shouldn't be difficult...  you know if the support is
there by the version surely? (and therefore you know if a particular
commit will break deprecated options/vars .. so you can provide advance
warning that it's going to break, and then at the break a simple message
"latest version of ports you can use is .r<blah> as this version of make
is too old and the system is EoL)

Just my $0.02..

Regards,

Michelle

-- 
Michelle Sullivan
http://www.mhix.org/