Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2007 01:49:23 -0800 From: Ade Lovett <ade@FreeBSD.org> To: Aryeh M. Friedman <aryeh.friedman@gmail.com> Cc: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Subject: Re: duration of the ports freeze Message-ID: <F6B5CE10-B4E4-4625-B5C0-0EA459B7DD98@FreeBSD.org> In-Reply-To: <4753C9EA.4060705@gmail.com> References: <20071201204245.GA57218@lpthe.jussieu.fr> <20071201221533.GU50167@server.vk2pj.dyndns.org> <4751E4F3.9010603@gmail.com> <200712030302.51908.josh@tcbug.org> <4753C9EA.4060705@gmail.com>
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On Dec 03, 2007, at 01:18 , Aryeh M. Friedman wrote: I'm probably going to regret joining this thread, but quite frankly, the amount of horse being thrown around has gotten way out of hand. > I have practical knowledge here in working with different dependency > management systems (which is essentially what the ports system is)... > now that being said much of it is based on seeing how different people > have solved the problems raised by the methods you site as being > "invalid" Fine. Prove your practical knowledge. Take a small subset of the ports tree, x11/xorg springs to mind, bang around a few ideas, show why they're "better", and we'll take it from there. Interminable threads about "why <X> sucks", "why <Y> is better", "why don't you do it with <Z>" gets nowhere. Even a cursory glance at the archives of this mailing list would show that. > That is the purpose of the survey I sent out to start to uncover what > exactly the strengths and weaknesses are and decide if the weaknesses > are sufficent to warrent any kind of re-engineering. Unfortunately, as with most surveys, it suffers from a fundamental flaw in that it is self-selecting. It has gone out to that tiny subset of folks that: (a) use FreeBSD (b) use FreeBSD ports/packages (c) subscribe to ports@FreeBSD.org (d) feel like filling out a survey By my reckoning, just those 4 points have deselected at *least* 99% of folks that would potentially benefit from *any* kind of reworking. Hopefully, y'all will take this as constructive criticism from someone that (a) actually really does give a damn about FreeBSD/ports and (b) spends a lot of time, in conjunction with others, doing heavy-lifting infrastructural changes that aren't eye-candy. Around here, action, and not words, are taken much more seriously. We've heard the words before (albeit dressed and dolled up in a myriad of different way). Y'all are *not* going to get a (potential) rewrite of the ports system right first time. 18k+ ports, 4 different OS versions, at least 5 "useful" architectures. You do the math. Set up a wiki somewhere. Announce it to the community at large (hint, that means more than sending mails to @FreeBSD.org mailing lists). Put up some proposals (at this point, it really doesn't matter how hair-brained they might be). Let folks contribute in terms of editing. See what comes out of it. Highly restrictive mailing lists are *not* the right medium here. -aDe
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