Re: Stable tag will be slipped Sunday and release engineering will begin Monday

[Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@xxxxxxxxx>]

Bill Hacker wrote:
>> I think that it would behoove the BSDs to more tightly coordinate
>> the package systems. Especially, I think that for a smaller and
>> more progressive project like DragonFly, there are more important
>> and interesting things to be doing than building another ports or
>> pkgsrc replacement. I'm happy to see DFBSD not leaning that way.
>>
>
>The 'challenges' here manifold:
>
>- Of close-on 12,000 ports (packaged or not) there are
>probably fewer than fifty that "really, really, matter".
>
>- *which fifty* varies by whom you ask, and even their needs
>vary from one project, client, server or day of week to another.

Try installing GNOME?  Or KDE?  Both of those "really, really matter."
KDE alone brings the number to about 70 (using pkgsrc), by my count.

>- the vast majority of the source code is witten and maintained
>by folks who are either inactive, sporadically active, not specifically
>targeting the *BSDs, or any/all of the above.
>
>Which leads to depending on a large and diverse number of
>volunteers, each maintaining one or several ports in which they
>have both an interest, and the necessary expertise.

Which already exists for FreeBSD, and I suppose for pkgsrc too.  David
Rhodus and friends seem to have a good job with pkgsrc on DFly, though
there are huge holes still.  It would just be nice to pool those 
resources.  One bottleneck with the FreeBSD ports system is that every
patch has to wait for a committer to be committed.  Their gnats DB is
full of uncommitted ports patches.  It would be nice to figure out
some way about that.  Again, I think it should be possible to learn
from Debian: all their packages are contributed by volunteers too.

If it is possible to build GNOME and KDE out of the box, that should
take care of 95% of the remaining software.  And a lot of the other
build errors may be quite trivial to fix, if there's a build box
generating new packages each time there's a change in the ports or
pkgsrc tree.

>If any of the *BSD's were to try to bring this whole area
>'in from the cold' and put it under a formal process, they would
>probably have to drop the number of supported items to
>10% of the current 'body count'.

IMO, pkgsrc is already a huge improvement over ports, without being
uncomfortably different.  If the other BSDs would just adopt it, it
would be a big gain for everyone.

Rahul