Unable to use ports on 8.3 or earlier since r352986

[Doug Ambrisko]

On Fri, May 09, 2014 at 06:44:22PM +0200, John Marino wrote:
| On 5/9/2014 18:33, Steven Hartland wrote:
| > ----- Original Message ----- From: "Big Lebowski" <spankthespam at gmail.com>
| > 
| > 
| >> Well, the EoL was announced in January, and it is what its name is:
| >> end of
| >> life. There have been changes waiting to happen just for the 8.3 to go
| >> away, so when the day was reached, they've been applied. This doesnt seem
| >> very bad, but instead, just about time, since there was no reason to hold
| >> them off any longer.
| > 
| > In an ideal world everyone would have migrated off, but its not an ideal
| > world so being friendly to our users and not breaking everything in ports
| > at the first available opportunity would be nice.
| 
| I'll stress the previous point again.  The change that broke this was
| desired 8 months ago.  It was applied as soon as it was legal to do so.

FYI, because some might be legal doesn't necessarily make it in the
best interest of users.
 
| Anyone who knowingly chose not migrate off before the EOL pretty much is
| getting a lesson about why that was an unwise decision.  That lesson is
| not specific to FreeBSD.

There are company's that use FreeBSD as a basis of their product and can't
move quickly and when they move tend to move in big steps.  Doing a QA
of a complete OS is expensive and will turn up unknown new problems and
yes fix some as well.  However, when you have a large installed base
that is a big risk.  So rather then track an 8 -stable release it makes
more sense to focus to co-ordinate a move to 9 release and 10 release.
Once we pick a X.Y release we stick to it and back changes until we
go to a X+1 release.  Depending on SW requirements a newer port might
be required.  Also some company's depend on 3rd party binary SDK's.  We
have binaries running on "unsupported" OS versions but with newer OS kernels.

The company that I work for is not currently impacted by this but we
might if we have to grab a newer port for an older release of FreeBSD.

| > Users may well be quite happy to port the small number of OS security fixes
| > until they have completed their upgrades, I know thats something we plan to
| > do here. Ports on the other hand is a different matter, as the number of
| > fixes / changes is much higher so makes it impractical.
|
| They were supposed to have completed their upgrades prior to the EOL.

It that along the lines of saying that FreeBSD will stop running 4.x
binaries since FreeBSD 4 is not longer supported?  That is a value I
find good with FreeBSD that it is some what easy to do ... to make it
work well I have some rtld patches that deal with ports library conflicts
of name/version.

| >> From what I've read there doesn't seem to be a must have reason for this
| > change, if this is indeed the case is there any reason not to consider
| > users?
| > 
| > One example that springs to mind is the release version of pfsense is still
| > 8.3 so being to still compile updated ports with fixes for that is very
| > useful.
| 
| I don't know anything about pfsense, or why it needs to compile ports,
| but I think you should asked them why they haven't had a release prior
| to 8.3 EOL.  That's probably an excellent question.

Maybe they are spending their limited resources on a 10.1 release?

The point people are raising is that this is breaking things for them
with no easy migration plan except an OS redo of which they might not
have time to qualify to deploy.  So then they thing is it time to switch
to a different OS?

Thanks,

Doug A.