Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2003 23:54:11 +0100 From: Oliver Eikemeier <eikemeier@fillmore-labs.com> To: Charles Swiger <cswiger@mac.com> Cc: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Ability for maintainers to update own ports Message-ID: <3FB16893.2030200@fillmore-labs.com> In-Reply-To: <2E850FE8-1494-11D8-BD31-003065ABFD92@mac.com> References: <1068458390.38101.19.camel@dirk.no.domain> <20031110152000.622db381.lehmann@ans-netz.de> <1068471598.38101.77.camel@dirk.no.domain> <20031110163623.GC93583@procyon.firepipe.net> <1068495958.690.72.camel@leguin> <53EC784E-13C5-11D8-AD24-003065ABFD92@mac.com> <3FB00E53.8060603@fillmore-labs.com> <20031111021929.GA17050@xor.obsecurity.org> <73E9F604-1472-11D8-BD31-003065ABFD92@mac.com> <20031111183540.GA26599@xor.obsecurity.org> <3FB13AA5.7090209@fillmore-labs.com> <2E850FE8-1494-11D8-BD31-003065ABFD92@mac.com>
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Charles Swiger wrote:
> On Nov 11, 2003, at 2:38 PM, Oliver Eikemeier wrote:
>
>> Kris Kennaway wrote:
>>
>>> More broadly speaking, there doesn't seem to be significant interest
>>> from the community to provide support for old releases. If there was,
>>> it's something that could be provided by a group of interested members
>>> of this list.
>>
>> sysutils/pkg_install is a[n] attempt to supports older releases. In a
>> production environment it is not always possible to upgrade the base
>> system at will. I'll try my best not to break backwards compatibility
>> without a good reason.
>
> Good for you, Oliver. I don't think you're the only person with that
> sentiment; a significant number of ports reference OSVERSION in order to
> behave correctly on older versions of the OS:
>
> % find /usr/ports -name Makefile -exec grep -l OSVERSION {} \; | wc -l
> 585
Or to differentiate between -STABLE and -CURRENT?
[...]
> Apache-1.3.29, Python-2.3.2, and a lot of other useful software will
> build and install on versions of FreeBSD prior to 4.7 without using
> ports. The intent of the ports system is to help users run software on
> their machine, not to require users to upgrade to the latest version of
> the OS in order to update such ports.
I expect very few ports to fail on older systems (if they are not too old).
The problem for most maintainers here is testing (and debugging). I don't
support older systems in that sense, I can only try to fix problems that
are reported. No QA team to test the port on 4.7, 4.8 and 4.9 here...
But AFAIK Apple is deprecating old Mac OS X versions quite fast now, faster
that they did with Mac OS 9, so that doesn't seem to be so uncommon even
on commerical *BSD platforms?
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