Date: Mon, 25 Oct 2004 08:39:07 +0200 From: Miguel Mendez <flynn@energyhq.es.eu.org> To: "Loren M. Lang" <lorenl@alzatex.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Ports Improvements Message-ID: <20041025083907.654de77b.flynn@energyhq.es.eu.org> In-Reply-To: <20041024231643.GA6513@alzatex.com> References: <20041024231643.GA6513@alzatex.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
--Signature=_Mon__25_Oct_2004_08_39_07_+0200_xZ736nkgJLd3wzem Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit On Sun, 24 Oct 2004 16:16:43 -0700 "Loren M. Lang" <lorenl@alzatex.com> wrote: Hi, Kris has already pointed out that FreeBSD's ports system works in a different way, but I'll add my $0.02 anyway... > I'm curious if there is any major work being done in developing the > ports infrastructure right now or if it is mostly just minor features The ports system is being enhanced all the time. They don't push radical changes into the system but small steps, and I think that's the way it should be, as it leaves more room for testing. [portage] > biggest thing is the USE flags. One of the biggest annoyances I have > with major upgrades using portupgrade is when I leave it upgrading for > a day and come home to find it sitting at the mplayer-skins screen > asking what skins I want to install and that it spent less then an > hour doing any work upgrading. I really don't care much about skins, I'd say portage's USE is, at the same time, its best feature and its biggest weakness. A lot of people end up with broken programs due to exotic USE settings that no one else has tested. Others change USE options and then forget to run emerge in deep mode, ending up with a mix of programs and libraries, some of them depending on e.g. kde or gnome libraries and other that don't. As someone who has used both systems, I have to say that FreeBSD's fine grained OPTIONS is much better than portage's USE. Sure, it will ask you the first time (although you could just use BATCH if you want to use defaults for everything), but it will be automated the next time you update and/or rebuild the port. portage is far from perfect. For example, I had "-gnome" in my USE flags, and some dependencies of monodevelop were compiled that way. After building them it complained in the next ebuild that libfoo had been built without gnome and that I had to rebuild it again. (IIRC it was gtkhtml or a similar lib). > something. USE flags would also eliminate the need for ports like > exim-ldap. This is needed if you want to provide binary packages with different options. > In fact, I > think gentoo has at least 5 of the latest ebuilds in the mozilla > directory. This makes it easier to choice an older version if the > latest has some bugs not worked out yet. Yesterday I just ran across You can always cvs(up) to a given point in time. portage usually has ebuilds that are still marked x86 only, or even hardmasked (e.g. sylpheed-gtlk2). On FreeBSD, if a port is in the tree it will probably work. My impression is that the testing part on FreeBSD is better, and that portage relies more on 'commit and let people try it'. > still had problems. At least on gentoo I would of had five choices. You do have the choice in FreeBSD, cvs is your friend. > The last feature I would like to see in ports is the ability to hold > back certain ports or force them to always use packages. lang/ezm3 > and editors/openoffice-1.1 almost always fail compiling at some point > with cc1 being killed for eating too much memory. I prefer to always portupgrade has been able to do that for a long time. Have a look at pkgtools.conf in /usr/local/etc. > I might be able to volunteer some time to this as, at least the first > thing I mentioned I think could really use some work. Having said that, I like both systems and just wanted to point out that neither of them are perfect, and each one has its little advantages over the other. I don't see the point in portage-ing FreeBSD ports. I don think that some ideas could be borrowed from OpenBSD's ports, like fake installs and the very strict plist handling. I also like how they use more than one digest, thus making a possible MD5 and SHA1 collision nearly impossible. Cheers, -- Miguel Mendez <flynn@energyhq.es.eu.org> http://www.energyhq.es.eu.org PGP Key: 0xDC8514F1 Note: All HTML mail goes to /dev/null --Signature=_Mon__25_Oct_2004_08_39_07_+0200_xZ736nkgJLd3wzem Content-Type: application/pgp-signature -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.6 (FreeBSD) iD8DBQFBfJ+QnLctrNyFFPERAp3TAKDBl5/8UfBW1/eGr2YqG1O9CzwFaQCfXNqn 4xgTG7cqaGyLzZwZHEq9YaY= =fXR+ -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- --Signature=_Mon__25_Oct_2004_08_39_07_+0200_xZ736nkgJLd3wzem--
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20041025083907.654de77b.flynn>