Date: Wed, 8 Jan 1997 16:19:23 -0800 (PST) From: asami@cs.berkeley.edu (Satoshi Asami) To: imp@village.org Cc: m230761@ingenieria.ingsala.unal.edu.co, ache@nagual.ru, ports@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Niklas Hallqvist: archivers/hpack.non-usa.only Message-ID: <199701090019.QAA02492@silvia.HIP.Berkeley.EDU> In-Reply-To: <E0vi2OI-00031E-00@rover.village.org> (message from Warner Losh on Wed, 08 Jan 1997 11:06:17 -0700)
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* That said, what is the goal of the ports system? To be beautiful on
* all systems, or to have minimally invasive change to the software to
* get it to be functional on FreeBSD? You can't have both, since the
* former usually requires a boatload more work than the latter, and a
* lot of machines to try something on, and a lot of patence in getting
* things exactly right...
There are three ways to go here:
(1) Change the port in a way that is compatible with other operating
systems (*) using BSD or __44bsd__ (see David O'Brien's mail), and
send a patch to the author. Because of (*), the change is more
likely to be accepted, and the patch can be deleted in the next
release.
(2) Protect all the changes with __FreeBSD__, and send a patch to the
author. The patch is less likely to be accepted than (1) but at
least it's not intrusive WRT other OS's so there is a chance to be
accepted. When OpenBSD guys come along, we change some of them to
__FreeBSD__ || __OpenBSD__.
(3) Just change the ports to compile on FreeBSD. Don't send the
changes back to the author. The port may or may not work with the
next release. However, this port has a better chance to work on
OpenBSD than (2).
(4) Same as (1), but don't send back the patch to the author. See
disclaimer on (3).
The amount of work required by FreeBSD porters is (1) >> (2) > (3) >
(4). For OpenBSD porters, it's (2) > (3) > (4) > (1).
What does this mean? Not much, I don't think we can make a firm
"policy" on this, these are just for people to keep in mind. One
thing to note is that (2), if we you don't send the patch to the
author, is a clear no-winner.
Satoshi
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