Still having trouble with package upgrades

[Andrew Gould]

On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 1:12 PM, Benjamin Tovar <ben at robotoloco.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 07, 2012 at 12:57:46PM -0500, David Jackson wrote:
>>
>> So it seems like a happy compromise here. You will get what you need
>> and us newbies and other users who really dont want the extra
>> trouble of compiling will get our binaries. Everyone gets what they
>> want and is happy, it seems.
>>
>
> Yes, this sounds awfully good, except that I think it is much harder
> than you think. First, some options are mutually exclusive
> (i.e. ncurses vs slang)... so, maybe there are two, or three versions
> of the same package... and again, this sounds awfully good, except for
> the limited and volunteered time of a port maintainer. A happy
> compromise might be then to have binary packages of popular ports,
> which is how we have it now.
>
> Second, and I think this the most important reason, ports put the
> responsibility of the system on the user. They force you to make
> decisions on exactly what software is installed. You want the
> stability and freedom of FreeBSD without this responsibility, and this
> seems very hard to compromise (e.g., macosx and most linux
> distributions remove the responsibility by making all these choices
> for you).
>
> Is this newbie friendly? Probably not. Does it need to be? Well, it
> would be nice if more people use it, but if we remove the
> responsibility from the user, then it would not be FreeBSD, it would
> be something else. (Like Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, which sounds like what
> you are looking for.)
>
> --
> Benjamin Tovar
>

It is not newbie friendly. As a non-techie (CPA), however, I can tell
you that it makes the user a better user; and **that** is a good
thing.  Some things are worth doing.

:-)

Andrew