Removing documentation

[Roger Marquis]

> Michelle wrote:
>> The way it was forced down everyone's necks pushed it to 8.4 and 9.x
>> systems as well as 10.x, this was a bad decision.  It was a decision
>> made by someone who doesn't live in the real world of production servers
>> and production services...

It was actually worse than that.  Those of us who questioned the wisdom
of such disruptive and backwards-incompatible changes being implemented
mid-release instead of at a release boundry were A) ignored, B) told that
there were not enough (developer) resources, and C) even the announcement
was unprofessional and lacked justification for the rush job:

   There comes a time in the life cycle of just about every software
   package that it has bee re-evaluated, refreshed, deprecated or just
   retired.

   It is time that we bid farewell to the old pkg_* software that has been
   part of FreeBSD since the beginning, and has served us well.  After
   years of development, testing, and playing, pkg(8) has become a
   suitable replacement.

"there comes a time"?  "time that we bid farewell"?  These are not
suitable criteria IMO for dropping support of mission-critical
subsystems.  The FreeBSD Foundation SHOULD have played a part in insuring
a smoother transition to pkgng (much less portsng and, gack, rcng) but
this doesn't seem to have been on their radar.

>From my perspective as an advocate and long-time user (since 2.0.5) this
marked a low-point in the viability of FreeBSD vis-a-vis other FOSS
distributions.  Thankfully, going forward from FreeBSD 11 the release
cycle has been lengthened and base is going to be packaged.  Those of use
who support large numbers of dev and production systems can at least
expect that future upgrades won't be as time-consuming or, hopefully, as
buggy.

John Marino wrote:
> Michelle, I sympathize, but you're also not taking any responsibility
> for that situation.  All those transitions were announced years in
> advance.  I seem to recall you were completely unaware of those plans,
> and if that is accurate, it's something you should have been aware of as
> the administrator of real world production servers.

I believe this is factually incorrect.  We were aware but the decisions
were being made by core developers who were not, apparently, interested
in our concerns or the expected fallout.

> There was always the option of freezing the tree and pulling in the
> security updates manually until you were ready to migrate to pkg(8) too.

Sure, if you can afford to pay a full-time core dev there's the option of
backporting but even this was made impractical by the simultaneous
deprecation of the pre-ng ports tree, make version and pkg format.

There are lots of reasons why Linux has effectively eclipsed BSD
including device drivers, unattended deployments and install menus but
8.X's wholesale throwing of so many of us under the bus was by far the
worst.

IMO,
Roger Marquis