Date: Sun, 03 Aug 1997 11:51:21 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> To: asami@cs.berkeley.edu (Satoshi Asami) Cc: ady@warp.starnets.ro, current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: ports-current/packages-current discontinued Message-ID: <2847.870634281@time.cdrom.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 03 Aug 1997 06:27:43 PDT." <199708031327.GAA01671@blimp.mimi.com>
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> Note that even if we choose to support 3.0-current instead, it won't > be a pretty sight if tcl-8.0beta2 stays in the tree. Most of the > tcl/tk ports are written for tk-4.[12], meaning they need tcl-7.[56]. > So users will end up installing a new version into /usr/local anyway. FWIW, I don't think that supporting ports in -current is a long term strategy for success anyway. Even if TCL had never made it into the tree, I can easily envision multiple other scenarios which would result in serious headaches for anyone trying to track a moving target (and for those who've thought that -current raced along at a breakneck pace in the past, let me just say "HA! You haven't seen anything yet - wait until the paid, full-time developers start coming online in more significant numbers"). I'd like to step outside the whole TCL fracas for a moment and consider this from a strategic point of view. Our most important branch of development from the customer POV is not -current, it's the current release branch. It's this branch which most needs packages built for it, it's this branch which most people will install off of CD and, if you look at the download stats on ftp.freebsd.org and other sites, it's the most popular download target. The folks who run -current are another breed, and I think it's also safe to say that they're the most capable of building their own packages and/or adapting ports to their use (and if they're not so capable, they probably should not be running -current in the first place). We have shown an alarming tendency up to now to "oversell" -current as the place to be and I see this as a very dangerous practice, only to become all the more dangerous once we start seriously wading in with the multiple platforms and (I think this is becoming a foregone conclusion) ELF support. Trying to match -current's rate of change in the ports collection is nothing more than a recipe for insanity and premature death among our ports team and I also think it's a waste of their time and abilities. Up until now we've had it exactly *backwards* in our policy of supporting -current and dropping support for the release branch quickly (something which has created a lot of ill-will in the user base, I might add, as reading USENET will show) and when I read Satoshi's announcement that he was dropping support for -current, I felt no dismay at all. I've always regarding this as inevitable, and having more attention paid to our release branch as a result can only be a good thing for the majority of our user base. Jordan
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