Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Sun, 19 May 2019 02:29:49 +0000
From:      Mark Linimon <linimon@lonesome.com>
To:        Jan Beich <jbeich@FreeBSD.org>
Cc:        Adam Weinberger <adamw@adamw.org>, svn-ports-head@freebsd.org, Alexey Dokuchaev <danfe@freebsd.org>, Wen Heping <wen@freebsd.org>, svn-ports-all@freebsd.org, ports-committers@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: svn commit: r501789 - in head: . lang lang/clips
Message-ID:  <20190519022948.GA18821@lonesome.com>
In-Reply-To: <o93z-uy0t-wny@FreeBSD.org>
References:  <201905161356.x4GDuH46087910@repo.freebsd.org> <20190518102821.GA62145@FreeBSD.org> <CAP7rwci=2zOy_mvJ7A=oGnVehQnH-8_TER027RW7JjSPvFANYA@mail.gmail.com> <v9y7-zit9-wny@FreeBSD.org> <20190518203434.GA1858@lonesome.com> <9B96C374-0946-491B-AA27-27802B9257A7@adamw.org> <o93z-uy0t-wny@FreeBSD.org>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
If we wrote every single possible "policy" aka rough consensus in the
Porter's Handbook it would be a thousand pages long.  And nothing but
arguing would ever get done.

Actually, while on portmgr, for a number of years I attempted to generate
such consenses and document them.  The results are on:

  https://www.freebsd.org/portmgr/policies.html

et alia.

Have you ever read this document?

(I know perfectly well that this is a leading question.)

Hundreds of hours were spent on the portmgr/ pages -- I know, because
I spent them.  Hundreds of emails were sent back and forth.  Many long
arguments on IRC were had.

And you know what the net effect of all this was on the users?

Zero.  Zilch.  Nothing.  Nada.  Rien.

The ports that were broken before all this policy was hammered out were
still broken.  The Makefiles that didn't conform to common style, stayed
the same.  And on and on.

To be really ugly about this, I would like to have every single second
of that time back.  Because it accomplished ***nothing***.

tl:dr; it you demand a perfect consensus and a hard-written set of rules
from a group of people -- not just portmgr but *any* group of people
anywhere -- you're going to spend a lot of your time being disappointed.

mcl

p.s.  this, and other equivalent arguments, are why I finally quit
portmgr.



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20190519022948.GA18821>