Can't build ports on older FreeBSD machine

[Joel]

On Wed, 20 Apr 2005 17:10:04 -0600
Brett Glass <brett at lariat.org> wrote

> At 09:16 PM 4/19/2005, Joel wrote:
>   
> >It sounds like a wonderful idea. 
> >
> >Who's going to pay for it?
> 
> The same guy who's paying all of the port maintainers now. ;-)

You can't see the irony in what you just said? 

> >Oh? Well, okay, MSWxp sp2 is not what I would call professionally
> >crafted software. 
> 
> They're professionals; they're just not always competent professionals.
> But they're light years ahead of FreeBSD on the issue of maintainability.

What on earth do you expect to gain by saying such a thing?

> With FreeBSD, the answer is almost always to wipe the system clean and
> rebuild from scratch.

That is entirely dependent on the experience you have. If you know
OSxyz intimately, you will go dig into whatever semantic junkheap that
system registers its stuff in, maybe dig out some old versions of
libraries, that kind of thing. If you aren't so familiar, you won't
waste too much time twiddling things you don't understand, you'll just
wipe and re-install something. The pain of re-installing the entire
system tends to discourage wiping the entire system, however.

If you don't know OSxyz intimately, the threshold for the re-install is
much lower. That's all.

> >I'm not going to lie. If it were possible to fund each of the BSDs
> >enough to maintain professional backporting services for every release,
> >I'll admit it would sure be nice. 
> 
> There's no need. Again, just maintain a record of the most recent
> version of each port that will work on each release of FreeBSD that
> has not been EOLed.

Good. _You_ start this wonderful compatibility database. Maintain it by
hand until you realize it isn't as easy as you thought. Then write the
software to maintain the database more or less automatically. At that
point you might try to sell your compatibility tracking database to the
developers. (Free beer costs, you know.) Or, if you're smart about it,
you'll show your hand-built database early on and ask for suggestions.
If you do a good enough job structuring (and selling) it, you may even
find someone willing to help build the software side, or at least get
some developers who'll show you how.

But you should realize freebsd already has a competing database in place.
It's not very accessible to people like you and me who don't get our
hands into the code very often. But it is very accessible to the
developers, so your database starts out at a significant disadvantage.

> Simple. And make sure that the port collection
> as a whole does not break itself when updated according to the 
> recommended procedure. (This is the least one could expect of software
> of even mediocre quality.)

If you do the update according to the recommended procedures, things
don't break. Or if they do, fixing it yourself just happens to be one of
the essential steps in the recommended procedures. 

Which is what I guess you don't get. 

When you use freebsd, you are part of the dev process whether you are in
deep or just testing. Not nearly so much so, perhaps, as with netbsd or
openbsd, but much more part of it than with RedHat or Mac OS X. (And
Microsoft these days has cut the end-users completely out of the loop,
which is why so many end-users are cutting loose from Microsoft.)

What you are asking for is something you can (sort of) get most of the
time from Apple or RedHat. If it's that important for you to be able to
keep your hands out of the code, I recommend either one. Just recognize
that the cost of the software is part of what's paying the developers to
make it easy for you to keep track of what works and what doesn't.

And, until you try to keep track of it yourself, so that you understand
it ain't nearly as trivial as you keep saying it is, well, you're going
to have a hard time selling your point of view here.

--
Joel Rees   <rees at ddcom.co.jp>
digitcom, inc.   株式会社デジコム
Kobe, Japan   +81-78-672-8800
** <http://www.ddcom.co.jp> **