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Date:      Tue, 30 Aug 2011 19:26:21 -0500
From:      Mark Linimon <linimon@lonesome.com>
To:        Vadim Goncharov <vadim_nuclight@mail.ru>
Cc:        freebsd-arch@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: FreeBSD problems and preliminary ways to solve
Message-ID:  <20110831002621.GA24932@lonesome.com>
In-Reply-To: <slrnj5qnk8.17m0.vadim_nuclight@kernblitz.nuclight.avtf.net>
References:  <slrnj4oiiq.21rg.vadim_nuclight@kernblitz.nuclight.avtf.net> <dae4b29c363977d83e857bed8e253ae8@etoilebsd.net> <j2u27m$euj$1@dough.gmane.org> <slrnj5au9n.7nm.vadim_nuclight@kernblitz.nuclight.avtf.net> <20110830082328.GB8085@lonesome.com> <slrnj5qnk8.17m0.vadim_nuclight@kernblitz.nuclight.avtf.net>

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On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 10:04:57PM +0000, Vadim Goncharov wrote:
> What I have heard from NetBSD engineers is that pkgsrc already bulk-builds
> more than 7000 packages on FreeBSD without any specific efforts to support
> it on FreeBSD.

There's specific code already in pkgsrc to support FreeBSD (see below).

> Why can't we take what is best from them? [...] In fact, combining
> pkgsrc into a single thing with a single team for all *BSDs would be
> a very great thing [...]

I rarely see calls for us to combine, but every week I see calls for testing
patches to the FreeBSD ports collection.  That's where I've decided to spend
my own time as being most effective.  Someone else would have to pick up the
task of comparing and merging.

> saving many amounts of human work when done.

Possibly, over a very, very, long period of time.

In the meantime, a quick check of the following

  http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/pkgsrc/mk

shows _more than 300 files_ in the repo (most of which are *.mk).

If we were to move to that, we'd have to retrain hundreds of committers,
thousands of maintainers, and tens of thousands of users on that codebase.
And that's even after we did the many, many, months of work to add features
that our users have come to depend on (e.g. MOVED) into pkgsrc, and adding
all the applications that we have that are not yet availble there *.

I think you are incredibly, incredibly, underestimating the amount of
work that has gone into both of these systems, the amount of time it
takes to become familiar with each one, and the amount of time that
has been spent to get so many applications ported into each one.  There
are tens of thousands of lines of code in multiple languages (including
make(1) as a language) in each, with multiple interlocking dependencies
and the subtleties therein.

The amount of work to do this merge would dwarf by orders of mangnitude
fixing the problems in our individual ports right now.

Having said all that, I would be very interested to see a feature-
comparison chart between FreeBSD, pkgsrc, and OpenBSD ports.

mcl

* pkgsrc: 10086 per ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/README-all.html
* FreeBSD: 22758 per http://portsmon.freebsd.org/portsoverall.py



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