Date: Mon, 8 May 2006 19:46:06 -0700 From: Gary Kline <kline@tao.thought.org> To: Sideris Michael <msid@daemons.gr> Cc: Gary Kline <kline@tao.thought.org>, freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Subject: Re: ports structure and improvement suggestions Message-ID: <20060509024606.GB52788@thought.org> In-Reply-To: <20060508212319.GA74691@daemons.gr> References: <20060508200926.GA6005@daemons.gr> <1147119806.18944.59.camel@ikaros.oook.cz> <20060508211402.GB49575@thought.org> <20060508212319.GA74691@daemons.gr>
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On Tue, May 09, 2006 at 12:23:19AM +0300, Sideris Michael wrote: > On Mon, May 08, 2006 at 02:14:02PM -0700, Gary Kline wrote: > > On Mon, May 08, 2006 at 10:23:26PM +0200, Pav Lucistnik wrote: > > > Sideris Michael p??e v po 08. 05. 2006 v 23:09 +0300: > > > > > > > This is likely to start a flame war, or at least a spit-ball > > fight. I hope not.... Some months ago after using RedHat's > > update stuff, a few people seemed a bit upset at my enthusiasm. > > Since then RH got greedy and stopped their free or cheapware > > approach and I eventually found the next best altrnative to > > FBSD: Ubuntu. Among their ``idiotware'' apps is a GUI front end > > to their apt-get stuff. In 11 months of use, I've managened to > > keep 2 Ubuntu systems current with a few mouseclicks a month. > > > > Nutshell, is there a way of using this approach? If not, > > is there a way of perl- or /bin/sh- or /bin/ch- bundling > > portupgrade with pkgdb, and other upgrade programs to get > > something more rational working? Most of the times that > > portupgrade screws up, it is due to a build failure. Sometimes > > it's easy to figure out why the build failed; when it is a > > ./configure snafu, it's always hours of time backtracing. > > Time N failed builds. ...Too much. > > The problems here are really two. Decide a standard way for configuring ports and > include in the base system a tool that will upgrade the installed ports. Both of > them are easy to achieve. Having in mind always that there are people in the mood > to improve things. Bored and irresponsible people should be vanished in my opinion > cause they are a cancer for a project like FreeBSD. And it is really sad to hear > that the port maintainers are bored to modify the Makefiles. And it even more awful > to hear that even if the current Makefiles are modified, there is no way to ensure > this for future ports. Unacceptable. Yeah. I'm at least as guilty as anyone because I have four or five ports under my name--2 I wrote. Since then life has done some trips on me, I've forgotten the How-to's of creating or updating a port. So my latest fixes have sat here for 2,3 years. ((I've got small programs that might be useful to some people, but don't share because the porting is a bear.... that's a side-bar.)) One important q is why aren't packages more widely used? I have to have at least 5.4 or 5.5 to fetch any pkg. I love src, but less when it takes hours to download over my ISDN wire and days to build, say OO. Or firefox. If I want to see how person X did some function y(), I can grab the source. -- Suggest that, rather than having endless debates about which should be the standard method of confguration, people make pro/con lists and present their conclusions. Re modifying the makefiles, can this be done largely by script? -- Gary Kline kline@thought.org www.thought.org Public service Unix
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