freebsd-ports Digest, Vol 732, Issue 4

[Aric Gregson]

> Since portmaster is still popult and since the only solutions that
> looks to be available in the near term are pouderiere or raw make,
> neither terribly viable for many, I will look into updating
> portmaster to deal with 'flavors'. 

Thank you so very much for attempting this. I too am dependent upon
portmaster, which 70% of the time works just fine. It is frustrating
when builds fail, or in the case of rust, when it can never update
properly. Despite its flaws and the lack of consistently reporting
work-arounds in UPDATING, portmaster is easy to set-up and run and in
combination with portsnap simplifies port management. 

Poudriere may work extremely well, but it remains poorly documented. I
gave it a go about six months ago. To set it up I relied on 1.5 blog
posts and hoped that they were accurate. In my first attempt at building
my ports tree, it failed to build R. I was not able to find
documentation of how to accomplish what poudriere was asking of me. It
was simple to delete the jail and move back to portmaster.

If it is the decision of the FreeBSD community is to ditch everything
but poudriere (and maybe synth?) then a very concerted effort must be
made to improve the documentation for setting up, migrating, using and
debugging poudriere for the casual user, much like has been done for
portmaster up until now.

Thanks to everyone for their continued contributions to make FreeBSD
awesome.
Aric