The ports collection has some serious issues

scratch65535 at att.net scratch65535 at att.net
Sun Dec 18 15:21:32 UTC 2016


 On 17 Dec 2016, at 20:47, Alphons van Werven
<freebsd at skysmurf.nl> wrote:
> But ever
>> since some time during the 9.X era I started to pick up signs that the
>> FreeBSD project as a whole is moving into a direction that troubles me--in
>> some cases deeply indeed.

I don't know what direction Fonz sees the project moving in [his
loss will be significant, and I personally wish he would
reconsider], but I've had a sense for some time that there's an
undercurrent of some kind moving us insensibly toward Linux and,
strangely, a mix of uncaringness and authoritarianism.  

I can't really quote specifics on my perception of a Linux-ward
drift because I haven't been keeping an evidence notebook.  But
for evidence of authoritarianism creeping in,  I offer the
imposition of the new pkg utility on all of us awhile back even
though it was still half-baked.  That came as qute a shock, at
least to me.  I didn't like it at all.   And now there seems to
be some psychological warfare going on over basic build tools.

I go back a ways with FreeBSD,  v1.1.3 or something like that. So
I'm not ready to bail, but I really, truly, no-kidding perceive a
drift toward incoherence that, unless reversed, will make FreeBSD
just another footnote in computing history, like Minix, 386BSD,
the UCSD P-system, and others that after a brief heyday ceased to
matter because their support base was hobby-oriented and
uncommitted, with neither a clear vision for the future nor even
a desire for one.


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