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Date:      Sat, 02 Aug 1997 22:14:02 +0100
From:      Ade Lovett <ade@demon.net>
To:        "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>
Cc:        current@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: ports-current/packages-current discontinued 
Message-ID:  <E0wulUw-00009C-00@genghis.eng.demon.net>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 02 Aug 1997 13:58:14 PDT." <16217.870555494@time.cdrom.com> 

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"Jordan K. Hubbard" writes:
>
>I think you're suffering from a fundamental misunderstanding of how
>these things work. :-)

Well, yes and no :)  I freely admit to being more "corporately-aware"
than how things are necessarily done with the core teams of the
various *BSD's out in the world.  However, at certain critical
points in any products lifespan, there are certain key decisions that
do have to be made which will have a major impact on the future.

I believe that issues raised with regards to the tcl thing are now
showing that a critical period has been reached and something
"has to be done"[tm] about it.

In an ideal world, everybodies point of view could be considered,
the pro's and con's of each suggestion weighed up, and a decision
reached.  Unfortunately, design-by-large-committee very rarely
(if at all) works effectively.

For this reason, and this reason alone, I suggested that the
core-team "mandate" an appropriate decision simply because they're
an identifiable and small entity.

Perhaps "mandate" was the wrong word to use, though I can't for the
life of me think what the right word is :)


>So it's really the other way around - until a truly defensible system
>of package layering and installation is both proposed and proven
>through some set of Makefile diffs which demonstrate the viability of
>the concept, it's moot.

I'm not entirely sure that it's going to be as simple as a set
of Makefile diffs though :(  For example, if one considers the
approach of a FreeBSD-base + FreeBSD-approved-packages system, then
substantial changes would have to be made to the entire source tree.

Whether such changes would take the top-level form of a set of
changes to allow "make world-base" and "make world-all", or two
entirely separate source trees for base and approved-packages,
or some other method, we're talking about an enormous amount of
work for a proof-of-concept system, especially with the constant
changing of the source trees themselves.

We live in interesting times.

-aDe

-- 
Ade Lovett, Demon Internet Ltd.



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