Welcome flavors! portmaster now dead? synth?

[Adam Weinberger]

> On 1 Dec, 2017, at 10:59, Kevin Oberman <rkoberman at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> First, welcome flavors. It has been badly needed for a while and is going
> to clean up a couple of messes that have been plaguing the port system for
> a long time.
> 
> Second, whither port msanagement tools? At least portmaster now appears
> dead. Any reason to expect it to be workable again? I have not tried synth
> with flavors, yet,.but I see noting committed to deal with them, so it
> looks like port management has devolved to raw "make" operations or
> poudriere. Am I missing some other option?

You asked some good questions in addition to the above, but I'll let others answer those. I want to specifically address the above question, because it will be asked many times in the near future (and again when 2018Q1 branches).

As discussed in multiple threads on this list, going back the better part of a year, portmaster is not actively developed. Multiple people have expressed interest in fixing it, but nobody has actually stepped up to do so. While I certainly hope that portmaster will be fixed to support flavours, there's no guarantee that that will ever happen. We've been begging people for a long time now to switch to poudriere for exactly this situation. I don't use synth myself, but I believe that it supports flavours. If I'm wrong about this, somebody please correct me.

So no, you're not missing some other option. Poudriere, synth, and raw make are the only ways to use the ports tree at this time. Again, I do hope that portmaster will be patched eventually, but for now it is broken. Anybody is free to work on it. tz@ maintains it and is your point of contact for it.

# Adam


-- 
Adam Weinberger
adamw at adamw.org
https://www.adamw.org