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Date:      Thu, 21 Mar 1996 08:49:30 -0700
From:      Nate Williams <nate@sri.MT.net>
To:        asami@cs.berkeley.edu (Satoshi Asami)
Cc:        nate@sri.MT.net, ache@FreeBSD.org, ports@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: ssh-1.2.10; ok to run?
Message-ID:  <199603211549.IAA13334@rocky.sri.MT.net>
In-Reply-To: <199603211226.EAA06125@silvia.HIP.Berkeley.EDU>
References:  <199603210628.XAA10210@rocky.sri.MT.net> <199603211226.EAA06125@silvia.HIP.Berkeley.EDU>

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>  * Cc: ache@FreeBSD.org, ports@FreeBSD.org
> 
> I assume you just added "ports" to the CC: list, since I haven't seen
> any of the mails quoted....

Yep.

>  * However, this port is useless to me for several reasons:
>  * 1) It requires a lot of useless ports, such as TK, Perl5, and Wish.
>  *    None of these are necessary, and the configure scripts already knows
>  *    they aren't necessary.  If I remember right Peter and I argued with
>  *    Andrey about this very thing.  I'm trying to install this on my
>  *    router box, and it has (and NEEDS) none of the above tools.  It's got
>  *    a smallish disk already, I don't need alot of bloat for security
>  *    tools that DON'T NEED all of the extra junk just to get a working
>  *    ssh/sshd binary.
> 
> This I can't comment on, it's up to the maintainer.  If you can
> convince me enough I might assert my "authoritative power" (:) but I
> generally try to avoid sticking my head into something I don't
> understand (like security).

Fair enough.  It appears Andrey is going to modify it to not require
WISH and Perl, so that's one win. :)

>  * 2) This port only works under -current.  That may be fine and good, but
>  *    the next 'official' release of FreeBSD on CD is going to be -stable,
>  *    which means that this port won't build on it.  Again, my firewall box
>  *    is running -stable on a small disk, but even if it had a *huge* disk
>  *    I'd have to be running -current to get this port to compile.
> 
> I'm sorry about that, but we've been over this before.  The ports
> collection always has, and continue to, support -current only.  That
> the previous CD had compiled packages for that version is nothing
> short of a miracle, I've been holding back several changes that would
> make it incompatible with -stable until the release.
> 
> This is no longer possible with the increasing divergence between
> -current and -stable, we simply don't have the resources (both man
> hours and machines) to maintain two trees.

Hmm, so does that mean the next 'official' CD out of Walnut creek will
contain the old 2.1 packages and none of the new packages?  I ask that
because finding out which work and which don't under 2.1.1 is going to
be a *LOT* of work (more work than you want?), so it'll be easier to
ship the old and crufty ports than to fix all the new ones.

> Thus, the next release will ship with the old ports tree and packages.

Hmm, I guess I wish it didn't have to be that way, *especially* for
ports such as ssh where the old packages is effectively useless due to
security bugs.

But, that's the price of progress.

>  * So, what is it going to take for me to get ssh working under FreeBSD
>  * short of building it by hand like I have to do on the Suns?  It seems
>  * like a waste of my time to do this when we have this *really* nice ports
>  * system in place.  (Although I will admit, I don't have to go looking for
>  * the distributions since their locations are in the Makefiles. :)
> 
> Just comment out the *_DEPENDS you don't want in the ssh Makefile,
> I've heard it will complain but build it anyway.  Or if you are sure
> you have the things you really need (I think only libz qualifies), do
> a "make NO_DEPENDS=yes".

I just gave up on it and built it by hand.  It was too much trouble to
figure out last night at midnight, so I simply looked at what the
Makefile was doing and built it by hand.

> Sorry, the ports scheme (by its very definition) is not very efficient
> in filling everyone's need.  It tries to make the majority happy, and
> has to assume certain things (like, people would have perl5 and tk4
> installed by now)....

However, I suspect the majority of the folks are running -stable and not
-current, so at this stage of the game the packages which depend on
-current are not useful to them.

Thanks for responding,



Nate



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