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

["Devon H. O'Dell " <dodell@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Apr 04, 2005 at 03:30:42PM +0000, Rahul Siddharthan wrote:
> 
> 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.

I don't use either of them. I don't want them. They don't matter
at all. I'm not even using DF as a desktop system. This is the 
point Bill is making.

> >- 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.

About the only things I like about apt is that it's a binary
system and that upgrades are easy. I don't really care what
system I use as long as it makes upgrading easy for me and
doesn't require me to spend hours of CPU time to build things
to stay up-to-date with packages (yes, this is a problem even
when you don't use Gnome or KDE -- even when you're not using
DragonFly as a desktop ;).

> 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.

Only for desktop systems. I use my DragonFly machines for
different machines entirely; my desktops use either blackbox or
rio from plan9port.

> >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

Wishful thinking :)

--Devon

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