Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Wed, 03 Sep 2014 17:15:35 +0200
From:      Michelle Sullivan <michelle@sorbs.net>
To:        Tom Evans <tevans.uk@googlemail.com>
Cc:        "ports@freebsd.org" <ports@freebsd.org>, freebsd-stable <freebsd-stable@freebsd.org>
Subject:   Re: [HEADSUP] pkg(8) is now the only package management tool
Message-ID:  <54073097.6000006@sorbs.net>
In-Reply-To: <CAFHbX1JgG2Kzc%2B2BgN-DcYJjOTabRANpVy-HkYfQKRjEUK73xg@mail.gmail.com>
References:  <20140901195520.GB77917@ivaldir.etoilebsd.net> <540522A3.9050506@sorbs.net> <54052891.5000104@my.hennepintech.edu> <54052DFA.4030808@freebsd.org> <54053372.6020009@my.hennepintech.edu> <5405890F.8080804@freebsd.org> <CAF-3MvNBWSEWF-HarwF0xcXQgo=7-dO%2BtvLMO1maELPY0RVhQQ@mail.gmail.com> <20140902125256.Horde.uv31ztwymThxUZ-OYPQoBw1@webmail.df.eu> <5405AE54.60809@sorbs.net> <1D2B4A91-E76C-43A0-BE75-D926357EF1AF@gmail.com> <5405E4F5.4090902@sorbs.net> <5406BD65.705@digsys.bg> <5406ED34.7090301@sorbs.net> <5406F00C.6090504@digsys.bg> <C4EC1A3A-6EB1-4EE1-ACEA-12C8E203991C@cs.huji.ac.il> <358B9E99-5E02-47BA-9E30-045986150966@gromit.dlib.vt.edu> <540711FF.3050409@sorbs.net> <47F4AAAA-2D88-4F03-8602-880C4B129305@gromit.dlib.vt.edu> <54072011.7030800@sorbs.net> <CAFHbX1KTmqPCec1NN3=kC=RAc_RLGztf%2B1r4b=jiy5fJUQa-Rw@mail.gmail.com> <540723EC.5000908@sorbs.net> <CAFHbX1JgG2Kzc%2B2BgN-DcYJjOTabRANpVy-HkYfQKRjEUK73xg@mail.gmail.com>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Tom Evans wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 3:21 PM, Michelle Sullivan <michelle@sorbs.net> wrote:
>   
>> Tom Evans wrote:
>>     
>>> On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 3:05 PM, Michelle Sullivan <michelle@sorbs.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>       
>>>> I think portsnap should provide 'stable' - tested, known
>>>> working, security patched...
>>>>
>>>>         
>>> 100%, and as soon as someone comes along who is prepared to do and pay
>>> for that, I think we would all enjoy it.
>>>
>>> Unfortunately, someone like that doesn't yet exist, so it is
>>> unrealistic to just expect that infrastructure to be there.
>>>
>>>       
>> Well as I was one of the people trying to raise funds for FreeBSD (for
>> general stuff, not specifically this) and as $employer will *not* be
>> adopting FreeBSD now the chances of having such just reduced.
>>
>>     
>
> That's a fallacious argument; "if *someone* doesn't put the
> infrastructure in to place then *we* can't contribute more".
>   

Didn't say that, though I can see how it looks like that (because you're
not taking into account other emails.)

If the system had not been broken over night I would still be well on to
my way of to getting corporate support, but with echos of Mandrake
(co-incidentally produced in the same country as the latest breakage)
they're going to stay with enterprise OSs.

> This is what Linux distributions spend their money on; employing
> people to do infrastructure engineering. When a new release of httpd
> happens, people at Red Hat manually back-merge fixes to the version of
> httpd that is in their package repository.
>
> FreeBSD has volunteers who maintain the ports tree, they have no time
> to manually merge and test fixes, so when a new release of httpd
> happens in FreeBSD, the version changes and you get all the new
> features and bug fixes.
>   
Nope, as an ex-maintainer I can vouch for this.
> So if you use FreeBSD, that infrastructure is not there; you need to
> do it in house. 
Like I was doing. (and am not anymore because the entire build system is
now screwed and I'm not going to build it again.)

> How tricky that is depends on the size of your house -
> Netflix have no problems, Yahoo have no problems, SMEs like the one I
> work for - problems.
>
> I'm not denying the problem; just that specifying what should or
> shouldn't happen with the ports tree is not productive if you aren't
> proposing to actually do it yourself.
>
>   
Here's the problem, I saw the EOL last October, I read it, I understood
that after Sept 1, 2014 the old packaging system will no long be
supported as it's "EOL"

I continued the production database upgrade.

I continued my building of a completely new Puppet Environment for the
production servers.  I learned and built my own build system using
jenkings, virtualbox and poudriere.  I even built it so it would build
both pkgng and pkg_* versions of the repos... and with the pkgng without
docs (just reverse engineering the public FreeBSD pkg system.)

I continued freebsd-update'ing production servers to 9.2 then 9.3 where
possible (testing, and doing it all by hand) then integrating it into
puppet - in many cases writing my own puppet modules and patches to make
it work with FreeBSD (like the facter patch that gives interface aliases.)

I learned that the ports tree was being updated so much that things
would break every day in just 580 packages I have.

I changed the system so it would only start building when triggered and
would continually cycle until it got a complete and stable repo (with
regression testing)... sometimes this took over a month to get stable
(mostly just a few days.)

I took over maintainership of some ports to get staging done and to help
others (including virtuoso - which was no small task and something which
I don't use at all - amongst others I don't use.)

At this point (July/August 2014) I saw a convo between bapt and someone
else that led me to question , "So Sept 1, 2014 the entire ports builds
will change and pkg_* will be completely broken" .. - not just EOL, but
updated so they no longer work at all

Then around mid August after some patches had *finally* been applied I
triggered a new build which continued to cycle due to a bad TCL update
until August 30 when it 'fixed itself' ... but the build continued to
slowly make its way through got to 9.2-i386 on Sept 1... and guess
what... something caused it to restart because of a bad update and so
Sept 2 came and bapt deliberately and knowingly broke pkg_* in the ports
tree and my entire repo for non-pkgng started building itself for pkg
... which means my environment cannot be tested, so it'll never complete
and I can not upgrade without going to every server manually... not to
mention I have to rebuild the build environment completely to make it
work now, then I have to rebuild the testing environment to cope with
the switch from pkg_* to pkg, and then finally I have to switch all
servers to pkg and tell puppet to use pkg instead of pkg_* ...  I've had
about 2 months - even with keeping up the notices - and all I got was,
"No, you should plan better"... Well that's a real good way of getting
people who can help to keep helping...  FUCK THAT!

Michelle

-- 
Michelle Sullivan
http://www.mhix.org/




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?54073097.6000006>