Date: Mon, 15 Feb 2016 18:14:02 +0100 From: John Marino <freebsdml@marino.st> To: Roger Marquis <marquis@roble.com> Cc: FreeBSD Mailing List <freebsd-ports@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Removing documentation Message-ID: <56C2075A.5000409@marino.st> In-Reply-To: <20160215165952.6199743BFA@shepard.synsport.net> References: <56C1E579.30303@marino.st> <20160215165952.6199743BFA@shepard.synsport.net>
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On 2/15/2016 5:59 PM, Roger Marquis wrote: > It was actually worse than that. Those of us who questioned the wisdom > of such disruptive and backwards-incompatible changes being implemented > mid-release instead of at a release boundry were A) ignored, B) told that > there were not enough (developer) resources, and C) even the announcement > was unprofessional and lacked justification for the rush job: This makes no sense. Ports are not tied to base releases. And you think lack of developer resources is an invalid reason? > There comes a time in the life cycle of just about every software > package that it has bee re-evaluated, refreshed, deprecated or just > retired. > > It is time that we bid farewell to the old pkg_* software that has been > part of FreeBSD since the beginning, and has served us well. After > years of development, testing, and playing, pkg(8) has become a > suitable replacement. > > "there comes a time"? "time that we bid farewell"? These are not > suitable criteria IMO for dropping support of mission-critical > subsystems. The FreeBSD Foundation SHOULD have played a part in insuring > a smoother transition to pkgng (much less portsng and, gack, rcng) but > this doesn't seem to have been on their radar. You know good and well that people kick the can down the road FOREVER. You could have announced it 3 years ahead and people would still scream NOT YET! NOT YET! This would NEVER happen in Linux! It doesn't matter where you draw the line, you will never get everyone to respect it. It's never enough time. >> From my perspective as an advocate and long-time user (since 2.0.5) this > marked a low-point in the viability of FreeBSD vis-a-vis other FOSS > distributions. Thankfully, going forward from FreeBSD 11 the release > cycle has been lengthened and base is going to be packaged. Those of use > who support large numbers of dev and production systems can at least > expect that future upgrades won't be as time-consuming or, hopefully, as > buggy. "large numbers of dev and production systems" (push to memory stack) > I believe this is factually incorrect. We were aware but the decisions > were being made by core developers who were not, apparently, interested > in our concerns or the expected fallout. So you chose to ignore the deadlines in the hopes the pleading would work? You intentionally did not prepare against the published timetable? >> There was always the option of freezing the tree and pulling in the >> security updates manually until you were ready to migrate to pkg(8) too. > > Sure, if you can afford to pay a full-time core dev there's the option of > backporting but even this was made impractical by the simultaneous > deprecation of the pre-ng ports tree, make version and pkg format. No, it's not fully time. You just said "large numbers of dev and production systems", so I am pretty confident the business case would have been there for this. It's a business, right? You aren't talking about a shoestring hobby. > There are lots of reasons why Linux has effectively eclipsed BSD > including device drivers, unattended deployments and install menus but > 8.X's wholesale throwing of so many of us under the bus was by far the > worst. And now the fully circle. This is FreeBSD's Godwin's law. You know the discussion is over when somebody says that "[issue] of the day" is the root cause of BSD being eclipsed by Linux. Since I've heard [issue] replaced about 200 times, I'm kind of doubting it. I guess it's purpose is to make everyone involved with "[issue]" to feel personally responsible and oh what could have been if you hadn't of made the wrong decision....
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