Flavors *COMPLETELY* break the port system (synth and poudriere are useless)

Mel Pilgrim list_freebsd at bluerosetech.com
Wed Dec 6 23:40:35 UTC 2017


On 12/5/2017 2:25 PM, Baho Utot wrote:
> Thank you for taking a perfectly good system and breaking it as well as 
> making it unusable, unstable.  You just don't know of all the countless 
> hours spent after running an update and taking a week to get it working 
> again.

I manage (currently) 104 FreeBSD systems that are a mix of 10.x and 
11.x, on-metal and VM.  I use freebsd-update and poudriere.  The biggest 
issue in two years was back before I used poudriere and it was when the 
default version postgresql change I had to upgrade databases (something 
for which postgresql doesn't have automated tools).

The last time I had a major stability problem with FreeBSD was when I 
had a brand new Nocona Xeon system that would get interrupt storms 
running 5.x and had to run 6-CURRENT on it for a while because 6.x 
introduced MSI support.

The closest thing to a FreeBSD failure after that was Perl upgrades 
exploding all over the place because there was a time when the Ports 
Tree didn't handle Perl upgrades gracefully.

Looking back at two years of stats, all of the unplanned uptime resets 
are associated with hypervisor or power outages.

Experiences will vary, and it's totally fine if FreeBSD is not your cup 
of tea, but you're out of line condemning the project as a whole because 
your individual experience differed.

> It really helps motivate all of us users to continue to have to fix 
> broken systems due to broken ports system and then be told how great 
> things are, brings us so much joy and keeps our attitude positive.

I really don't know what advice to offer you other than that, from my 
observations, there is a very high correlation between people who have 
chronic stability problems with FreeBSD and people who insist on not 
using the officially endorsed tools and methods.

(Cue people utterly failing to understand statistics and citing single 
data points in 3, 2, 1...)


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