FreeBSD did it again (still)

[Thomas Mueller]

from Baho Utot:

> Well FYI the upgrade base 10.1 to 11.0-p10 when as expected. Update the ports
> to the current quarterly was a tragic happening.  I have done this before
> upgrade a desktop from 10.3 to 11.0-p0 then to 11.0-p9.  Again the ports just
> did not work as it resulted in a broken desktop each time.  I started using
> the quarterly ports branch thinking I get some stablilty.  No stability to be
> found.  Should I user be able to update without going thru a weeks worth of
> debugging?  I think that is not too much to ask.
        
> I have doing this since RedHat 4.0 in the mid 1990's. I know how to build
> software.  When I was using LFS I could go from LFS 5.0 to LFS 6.0 all the way
> to LFS &.5 and it always just worked.  I thinking I'll need to return to my
> own scratch built linux system to find some stability I am looking for.
> FreeBSD not so much.  Maybe OpenBSD will prove to be stable.

> I am not looking to update my system more than I change underwear, so I can
> chase the "Oh I have to have the latest".  I am looking for stable/working.

I updated on two computers from FreeBSD 10.1-STABLE to 11.0-STABLE, and experienced the same shared-library hell that you did.

None, or almost none of the ports, ran, except pkg-static.

I was able to rebuild portmaster and pkg, and then synth, on what had been upgraded to 11.1-BETA2.

But after I configured synth, and ran synth upgrade-system, only a few ports made it, and then the system crashed, and again a second time.

I can try on the other computer which also has the same FreeBSD version installed using NFS, see if maybe one computer is somehow especially unstable with FreeBSD 11-stable and HEAD.

It could also be instability in the rsu wireless driver; re(4) recognizes the Ethernet but fails to connect.

I have little experience with OpenBSD, never installed, used the LiveUSB from liveusb-openbsd.sourceforge.net, now outdated (OpenBSD 5.4).

But there is less shared-library hell with NetBSD than with FreeBSD.  I was able to startx after upgrading from NetBSD 7.99.15 i386 to 7.99.72 to 8.99.1, but after rebuilding modular-xorg, X would no longer start.

I assume shared libraries were in sync, but getting X to work in NetBSD is inconsistent, I could call it a crapshoot.

> Synth is one of the best tools for building ports for FreeBSD.
> It started on DragonflyBSD and "ported" over to FreeBSD.  After John Marino
> had dust up with the FreeBSD folks the FreeBSD folks kicked him out as a
> maintainer.  I still think that BS and a bad move by FreeBSD folks.  IMO he
> was trying to bring some sanity to FreeBSD build process, something like Arch
> linux does.  Which is/was a good thing.

I've been wondering if I should try to install DragonFlyBSD (cross-compile from FreeBSD or NetBSD?) and see how synth works there.

One problem with DragonFlyBSD on the USB-stick installer was being unable to mount/read NetBSD and FreeBSD partitions, and FreeBSD and NetBSD partitions could not mount/read the DragonFlyBSD USB stick: maybe a different flavor of UFS?  So I don't want to get into a mess and lose what I have on the hard drive.

Synth has also been ported to NetBSD/pkgsrc, and I have one pristine NetBSD-current (8.99.1) amd64 installation to try it on.  If it fails, back to regular pkgsrc.

Tom