Status of portupgrade and portmaster?

[Thomas Mueller]

from Chris H:

> FWIW I loved portmaster, but quickly found that by choosing it, I was
> *instantly* at odds with a large majority of the FreeBSD crowd.
> Eventually, I experimented with other choices, and finally landed on
> ports-mgmt/synth, and never looked back. Like Carmel, I found some aspects
> un-intuitive. But after figuring them out. I was hooked. John Marino did
> a wonderful job on this, and is very helpful.

On one computer (motherboard MSI Z68MA-ED55(B3)), synth works great, as long as I avoid the options dialog and put the options in /usr/local/etc/synth/LiveSystem-make.conf

But there is the annoyance that many useful dependencies are not installed unless I type the command to install those already-built packages.

On the other computer, motherboard MSI Z77 MPOWER, same FreeBSD version, 11.1-STABLE, synth fails most of the time and usually crashes.

I believe John Marino is unfortunately banished from FreeBSD but might still be active with DragonFlyBSD.

from Matt Smith:

> I agree. Portmaster was useful for many years but these days it is being left
> behind. The expectation is that ports are built in a clean room environment
> and portmaster does not provide that. I used synth for several months and it
> is a great tool. It works fine, but my problem with it is that the developer
> was forced out of FreeBSD and it needs an ada compiler.

> I think on FreeBSD 12 the ada compiler is broken isn’t it? Meaning synth will
> break. For this reason I switched to poudriere and that works fine for me. As
> that is the tool used by the pkg builders themselves I know it will work.
        
> For example we are shortly getting flavors support in the ports tree. I think
> the author of synth has already said he is not going to support this whereas
> poudriere will straight away.

Building synth requires gcc6-aux, but gcc5-aux and gcc6-aux would not build following the introduction of ino64.

I don't know if that has been fixed.

John Marino attempted to port synth to NetBSD with pkgsrc, but last time I looked, gcc6-aux is broken on NetBSD, Makefile says so.

Tom