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Date:      Fri, 24 Sep 2010 01:09:56 -0700
From:      Doug Barton <dougb@FreeBSD.org>
To:        Stanislav Sedov <stas@FreeBSD.org>
Cc:        cvs-all@freebsd.org, ports-committers@freebsd.org, Andrej Zverev <az@freebsd.org>, cvs-ports@freebsd.org, "Philip M. Gollucci" <pgollucci@freebsd.org>, "Sergey A. Osokin" <osa@FreeBSD.org>
Subject:   Re: cvs commit: ports/archivers/p5-Archive-Any pkg-plist ports/archivers/p5-Archive-SimpleExtractor pkg-plist ports/archivers/p5-Compress-LZF pkg-plist ports/archivers/p5-Compress-LZO pkg-plist ports/archivers/p5-Compress-LZW pkg-plist ports/archiver
Message-ID:  <4C9C5CD4.9080304@FreeBSD.org>
In-Reply-To: <20100924004958.1fb10eeb.stas@FreeBSD.org>
References:  <AANLkTi=9ZfAhdkAZ5dhXebM=4dpnnmC83Awg9O6EeED9@mail.gmail.com>	<4C9C4CDB.9000706@FreeBSD.org>	<20100924071832.GB72615@FreeBSD.org>	<4C9C52E0.2040507@FreeBSD.org> <20100924004958.1fb10eeb.stas@FreeBSD.org>

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On 9/24/2010 12:49 AM, Stanislav Sedov wrote:
| On Fri, 24 Sep 2010 00:27:28 -0700
| Doug Barton<dougb@FreeBSD.org>  mentioned:
|
|>
|> I think Philip described the standard very well in the portion of the
|> log that is quoted above. Personally, I've never seen or used such a
|> comment in any FreeBSD port, and can't imagine any reason why someone
|> would want to.
|
| I disagree.  The only thing he described is that he preferred one way
| over another as the standard one,

You snipped the part that I included that clearly said 87% of the p5
ports did not have this comment. As I said above, 100% of the ones that
I've ever worked with (which is a larger number than you might think)
have not had it. That sounds like a de facto standard to me.

| and I have not seen any comments
| about who it was discussed with.  Looks like it was one man decision
| from 3rd party person perspective.  At a bare minimum there should be
| a list of person who took part in the discussion, and what was the
| conclusion, because the commit itself, as was noted by osa@, has no
| evident benefit.

... nor did it cause any harm.

To me this (and your demand for documentation sound like a lot of
bureaucratic BS over a trivial change. I understand very well the
dynamic involved here, as organizations get larger they grow processes,
bureaucracy, etc. But what would be nice here is if some intelligence
could be applied to their formation.

And this is not just a philosophical issue. The whinging about this has
real impact on the people observing it. For instance, if I were a new
user, someone thinking about making a contribution to FreeBSD, or
potentially even a new(er) committer I would be looking at this thread
and thinking VERY carefully about whether or not I would ever want to
step even one little toe into the areas of infrastructure cleanup
because look what happens to people that do.

We have an enormous amount of "cruft" (and I'm really struggling here to
try and keep this post PG) that has built up in the ports system over
the years. At minimum we need to remove the non-functional elements in
order to make sure that they don't impede future progress. At best we
need to modernize and improve stuff that's broken, or even marginal
because with well over 20k ports the edge cases significantly impair our
maneuverability.

I have a lot of sympathy for Philip here because over the years I've
taken on a non-trivial number of similar projects, and not only is it
thankless work but it paints targets on your back which don't need to be
there. Philip has done a substantial amount of similar work in the past,
and personally I would hate to see him discouraged by pointless whinging
about a trivial change that can't possibly hurt anything.

| Deciding what's standard and what's not only by use number is not gonna
| work.  I'm pretty sure that most ports doesn't fully respect PREFIX or
| CFLAGS, but it's not a reason to drop it from ports that do.  Or changing
| all ports with dynamic pkg-lists to use static one just because most
| ports do this.

Sorry, those are red herring arguments because the things you're
describing are real, functional items that provide benefit. If someone
did sweeping commits to remove the things you describe I'd be right
there with you saying that there better be a very good reason, advanced
discussion, etc. This change doesn't even fall into the same
neighborhood, never mind the same category.


Doug

- -- 

	... and that's just a little bit of history repeating.
			-- Propellerheads

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