ACTION REQUIRED - Unstaged Ports being DEPRECATED on June 31st.

[Kurt Jaeger]

Hi!

> >> So we will be DEPRECATING and resetting maintainer on all unstaged ports
> >> on June 31st.
[...]
> Of course I might be wrong.  But if I am right, then it will become
> increasingly difficult to allow unstaged ports.

There is a real need and benefit for a wider approach to ports.

First, not every system can build all the ports it needs, due to
resource (cpu, disk space, wall-clock time and admin time).

So, between the ports infrastructure and the production systems,
there is a real need for binary packages. Compare the debian package
update processs and compare it to the freebsd package update process.
If FreeBSD wants to stay afloat, it needs to improve in that area.

Second, updating a host should be much easier. I support approx. 100
systems and we have a binary deployment process for packages which
basically is (for old-style ports): 

- copy a consistent pkg tree from the reference build host
  to the production host
- pkg_delete -a
- pkg_add *.txz

In the old world (not pkgng) this took considerable time (cpu,
wall-clock, admin) and was not very convenient.

So, pkgng provides a way to deploy and update which is much easier.

Third, for pkgng to properly provide this convenience, the ports
build process had to be revamped.

And the staging of a port, while initially looking like a huge
timesink while doing a port, yields much, much cleaner packages,
which are much easier to test, build and deploy.

Cleaner packages help in detecting inconsistencies, library
issues, left-overs, automatic quality-assurance during porting, etc.

So, staging is essential and keeping non-staged ports supported
looks unfeasable from my experience.

-- 
pi at opsec.eu            +49 171 3101372                         6 years to go !