The ports collection has some serious issues

[Dave Cottlehuber]

On Fri, 16 Dec 2016, at 16:34, Roger Marquis wrote:
> If portmaster was part of base I'd agree that it should be deprecated,
> however, being a port it can be afforded more leeway.  All portmaster
> needs IMO is a strong WARNING message to be displayed on installation A)
> enumerating some of the potential bugs and B) clarifying that portmaster
> is third party software that is neither actively maintained nor
> supported (or recommended?) by FreeBSD.
> 
> Roger

^ this ^

The key thing that needs to change for newcomers (as a recent one
myself) is to give a clear & simple recommendation in the Handbook.. not
in ports or whatever after you've sifted the internet looking for more
information

- the implications of choosing pkg quarterly vs pkg latest, vs
poudriere, portmaster etc is not at all clear
- it's hard to know what is project supported vs community supported
- knowing that e.g. DFLY uses synth exclusively now, and the the FreeBSD
build cluster uses poudriere, gives a warm fuzzy feeling

Some illustrative use cases are:

- sysadmin for servers
- personal user who needs custom options

I was lucky to run into the first poudriere episode from bsdnow.tv and
went with that from the get-go. synth's documentation is superb and
keeps getting better. Both are excellent tools.

A+
Dave