The ports collection has some serious issues

[Torsten Zuehlsdorff]

On 15.12.2016 16:29, John Marino wrote:
>>>> Although portmaster is not releated to the FreeBSD project and is an
>>>> outside tool, there aren't any alternatives from the project itself. So
>>>> use it or die. Not a nice situation.
>>>
>>> People have been trying to get portmaster deprecated and removed from
>>> the
>>> handbook but have met with resistance.
>>
>> Well, yes.  Because it works, has no dependencies, and there is no
>> equivalent replacement.  Except maybe portupgrade, which has legacy
>> problems like poor default options.
>
> Every single week, somebody falsely accuses the ports tree of being
> broken but the accuser is the only one with the problem.  What do they
> all have in common?  They are portmaster users.  I'll iterate, saying
> "portmaster works" means applying a very generous definition of "works".

Not really, no. Its not every week and often there is a misuse or 
miss-understanding of portmaster.

With an argument like this you can also state there is every week a 
falsely accuse, because of poudriere. This would also be true (and is).

>>> The recommended replacements are ports-mgmt/synth and
>>> ports-mgmt/poudriere.
>>> These build an entire package repository that the pkg tool can use
>>> but they
>>> do so in clean chrooted environments, and rebuild everything that's
>>> required
>>> to keep a consistent ABI. Synth is more designed for a single live
>>> system
>>> like a desktop or a single server, whereas poudriere is what the freebsd
>>> package build clusters use and is more designed for that type of
>>> usage. Worth
>>> taking a look.
>>
>> These are package builders.  Technically preferable, given adequate disk
>> space and memory, but not equivalent to portmaster.
>
> It's like saying git and svn are not equivalent to cvs.

I have a hard time to see git in this line. Its the way you use it. Yes, 
of course all three are code repositories. But one of them is a 
distributed repository and the other two are not. The differences are huge.
Of course it also depends on your usage. I personally (means "heavily 
subjective) find git more than annoying. It lacks very important 
features (user management), is hard to use in automatic environments and 
make easy things (rename/delete branches) very hard. Other people really 
like all of this. It depends.

So maybe the accusers just use the wrong tool?

Greetings,
Torsten