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To: Warner Losh <imp@village.org>
cc: asami@cs.berkeley.edu (Satoshi Asami),
        m230761@ingenieria.ingsala.unal.edu.co, ache@nagual.ru,
        ports@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: Niklas Hallqvist: archivers/hpack.non-usa.only 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 08 Jan 1997 11:06:17 MST."
             <E0vi2OI-00031E-00@rover.village.org> 
Date: Wed, 08 Jan 1997 13:41:34 -0800
Message-ID: <950.852759694@time.cdrom.com>
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
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> That said, what is the goal of the ports system?  To be beautiful on
> all systems, or to have minimally invasive change to the software to
> get it to be functional on FreeBSD?  You can't have both, since the

#2, without question.

I've also been watching this whole OpenBSD thing with very mixed
feelings.  I like that they are getting use out of the ports
collection, since that's always cool, but I'd hate to see the ports
collection get put under the same jeweler's loupe of pan-OS scrutiny
that the rest of the system gets.  The ports collection is not the
same thing as /usr/src/usr.bin :-)

I think that we should try to syncronize the make macros when it's
reasonable to do so (e.g. do not make bsd.port.mk even harder to
understand and maintain than it already is), but the idea of a unified
ports collection is almost certainly a fool's errand unless we unify
along a much broader front (include files, libraries, etc) and I, for
one, don't see that happening.

I think that the OpenBSD group should maintain its own ports tree,
adapting our ports when necessary, and we can just look over
eachother's shoulders occasionally to see if the other camp has
brought in something particularly neat.  Since a "port" is so small,
and the changes required generally so minor, the process of bringing
ports over from one side or the other is pretty simple anyway.

					Jordan