Status of synth following expulsion of John Marino?

[Adam Weinberger]

> On 15 Feb, 2017, at 12:17, abi <abi at abinet.ru> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On 15.02.2017 21:58, Adam Weinberger wrote:
>>> On 15 Feb, 2017, at 11:47, abi <abi at abinet.ru> wrote:
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 15.02.2017 18:00, Adam Weinberger wrote:
>>>>> On 15 Feb, 2017, at 2:26, Thomas Mueller <mueller6722 at twc.com> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> Expulsion of John Marino was a shocker to me, caught me by surprise.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Now my question is what is the status of synth?
>>>>> 
>>>>> Should I switch from portmaster to synth?
>>>>> 
>>>>> If synth is deprecated or dropped, after I switch from portmaster to synth, then I have to switch back, and this would be a monster mess of extra work.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Not to be inflammatory here, just want to know where I/we stand and don't want to go too far off course updating my ports.
>>>> 
>>>> I don't recommend portmaster for anybody. It's unmaintained, it already causes headaches on upgrades, and even though it works now, it is unlikely to keep working as the ports tree evolves.
>>> 
>>> This is FUD. Yes, portmaster can be less maintained, but it works without observable issues, at least I don't see any problems with it on my systems. synth and poudriere lacks the ability to set and maintain port options recursively, eliminating any practical (from user perspective, not developer) use of such software stand alone.
>> 
>> Sure it does.
>> 
>> poudriere options -j jailname editors/vim
>> 
>> Sets options recursively.
>> 
>> Not seeing any problems with it right now isn't the point of my message. The point is that portmaster WILL break when new features (currently in progress) are added to the ports build system, and being unmaintained, there's no guarantees that it will ever unbreak.
>> 
> 
> Poudriere can't be considered as an option for everyone due to it's connection to jails, synth can't set options recursively, however it's extremely simple to use.
> 
> According to current port tree, portmaster has maintainer and it's simple enough to be fixed by virtually everyone.
> 
> Can you provide link to new features? Never saw that port tree has some drastically changes.

You're right, jails do require more setup, drive space, and complexity (not to mention being quite slow on UFS). But at the end of the day, jails are a better paradigm for building ports. Most failures these days come from the environment influencing the build, or upgrade problems rebuilding ports when old ports stop working haphazardly. Best effort is taken to fix these problems, but maintainers and committers can't predict every setup possibility; the general target is making sure that they build in a pristine environment, meaning poudriere.

https://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=134825+0+archive/2016/freebsd-ports/20161225.freebsd-ports for the new features I was referring to.

# Adam


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