svn commit: r364739 - in head: . sysutils sysutils/syslog-ng-devel sysutils/syslog-ng-devel/files

[Adam Weinberger]

On 12 Aug, 2014, at 16:07, John Marino <freebsd.contact at marino.st> wrote:

> 1) They become a burden on everyone, even if they have a maintainer.
> Sweeping changes have to be applied twice.

This is a very real issue and you are 100% correct. Oftentimes -stable has fixes that -devel doesn’t (or vice-versa). Perhaps requesting that -devel ports be maintained by whomever maintains the -stable port would help this?

> 2) What if every port had a -devel version?   Now we are taking 45k+
> ports.

What if every port came with a can of beans? Now we are talking 45k+ cans of beans.

> 3) -devel versions are poor quality often

And sometimes the last release was a billion years ago and -devel is the only real option. We need to be able to provide the last-officially-sanctioned release, but we also need to be able to provide the living versions. mplayer and squirrelmail come to mind, and mutt was the same for many years.

> 4) -devel versions are often neglected and are often older than the
> stable version

This ties in with (1), I think, and is quite correct. Requiring that the same person maintain both would help, and we should consider a policy whereby -devel ports are marked IGNORE= as soon as the -stable port is newer. Right now you have to manually inspect both versions to figure out which one is actually newer.

Hell, you have to do that anyway. postfix, postfix-current, postfix28, postfix 29, postfix210. Is postfix the current stable (yes)? What about squid, squid32, squid33. Is squid the current stable (no)?

> To me, they are more trouble than they are worth especially when the
> ports are reset.  I think there should be a pretty high bar for devel
> ports, and maintainer need to justify why they want to convert the
> FreeBSD community into a testers for third party software (which is the
> reason I've heard).

I disagree. Many people are happy running bleeding-edge stuff. Many people PREFER running bleeding-edge stuff. I bet that we have users who prefer FreeBSD over *BSD because they can always get the latest and greatest. The vast selection of different options is one of the greatest features of our ports system. Don’t discount the worth of something just because it doesn’t matter to you.

# Adam


-- 
Adam Weinberger
adamw at adamw.org
http://www.adamw.org