Where is packages-6.2-release?

[Jonathan Wallace]

I think lack of disk space is a poor excuse for an organization
distributing an OS.  This isn't the 90's.  500GB drives are $99.00 at
newegg and that's enough to hold the OS, ports, and packages for 50
releases (at least).  Surely the decision not to keep older releases
where pkg_add() can find them by default, could not have been made
based upon lack of disk space.

There's no documentation about ftp-archive here
http://www.freebsd.org/ports/index.html, here
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/packages-using.html,
or even if I go to www.freebsd.org and try to use the search tool to
find any reference to "ftp archive".  That's great that you (as a
FreeBSD contributor) know where to find the old release packages, and
great that I do now as well.  But it really sucks that I had to spend
this much time finding that information when it could be documented in
the handbook or some other obvious location.  Certainly, it would seem,
one of the reasons Jordan wrote pkg_add() was for ease of use in regards
to finding and installing packages.  That work is just as certainly
trivialized when people at FreeBSD make bad decisions that cause the
command not to work "out of the box" and further causes a user to jump
through hoops to discover how to use the command for releases that are
hardly more than a few years old.
  
There should be a packages link at the same level of the ports directory.
Keep the ports directory structure as you want, but it doesn't hurt to
add a link and make the distinction more obvious in the ftp location.
The documentation makes the distinction and the ftp tree should as well.



-----Original Message-----
From: Kris Kennaway [mailto:kris at FreeBSD.org]
Sent: Saturday, March 15, 2008 6:42 PM
To: Incoming Mail List
Cc: freebsd-questions at FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: Where is packages-6.2-release?


Incoming Mail List wrote:
>> I have only ONE question.
>> Where is packages-6.2-release? I have FreeBSD 6.2, and tuning it.
>> Where I can download packages for my freebsd version?
> 
> Thats a great question, and it appears that the 6.2-release packages
> repository has been removed.  Looking in ftp.freebsd.org I see 5-stable,
> 6-stable, 6.3-release, 7-stable, 7.0-release, and 8-current.  There is
> no 6.2-release directory so "pkg_add -r" returns an error for any package
> that you try to load.  Very aggravating.
> 
> Apparently the release team is only providing packages for the most
> recent streams.  I'd like to know why that is, and also why they insist
> on listing "packages" under "ports".  The documentation makes it very
> clear there is a difference between the two.  Why anyone on the release
> team thinks it's intuitive to look for a ready-to-go "package" under
> a "ports" directory which has been defined by documentation as something
> that needs to be compiled, is a mystery to simpletons like myself.

Disk space is not infinite.  ftp-archive has old releases.  packages are 
built from ports and are part of the ports collection.

Kris