From owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Aug 31 00:26:21 2011 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id D3DB0106566B for ; Wed, 31 Aug 2011 00:26:21 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from linimon@lonesome.com) Received: from mail.soaustin.net (pancho.soaustin.net [76.74.250.40]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B36BC8FC13 for ; Wed, 31 Aug 2011 00:26:21 +0000 (UTC) Received: by mail.soaustin.net (Postfix, from userid 502) id 0F6805615B; Tue, 30 Aug 2011 19:26:21 -0500 (CDT) Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2011 19:26:21 -0500 From: Mark Linimon To: Vadim Goncharov Message-ID: <20110831002621.GA24932@lonesome.com> References: <20110830082328.GB8085@lonesome.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-06-14) Cc: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD problems and preliminary ways to solve X-BeenThere: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Discussion related to FreeBSD architecture List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Wed, 31 Aug 2011 00:26:21 -0000 On Tue, Aug 30, 2011 at 10:04:57PM +0000, Vadim Goncharov wrote: > What I have heard from NetBSD engineers is that pkgsrc already bulk-builds > more than 7000 packages on FreeBSD without any specific efforts to support > it on FreeBSD. There's specific code already in pkgsrc to support FreeBSD (see below). > Why can't we take what is best from them? [...] In fact, combining > pkgsrc into a single thing with a single team for all *BSDs would be > a very great thing [...] I rarely see calls for us to combine, but every week I see calls for testing patches to the FreeBSD ports collection. That's where I've decided to spend my own time as being most effective. Someone else would have to pick up the task of comparing and merging. > saving many amounts of human work when done. Possibly, over a very, very, long period of time. In the meantime, a quick check of the following http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/pkgsrc/mk shows _more than 300 files_ in the repo (most of which are *.mk). If we were to move to that, we'd have to retrain hundreds of committers, thousands of maintainers, and tens of thousands of users on that codebase. And that's even after we did the many, many, months of work to add features that our users have come to depend on (e.g. MOVED) into pkgsrc, and adding all the applications that we have that are not yet availble there *. I think you are incredibly, incredibly, underestimating the amount of work that has gone into both of these systems, the amount of time it takes to become familiar with each one, and the amount of time that has been spent to get so many applications ported into each one. There are tens of thousands of lines of code in multiple languages (including make(1) as a language) in each, with multiple interlocking dependencies and the subtleties therein. The amount of work to do this merge would dwarf by orders of mangnitude fixing the problems in our individual ports right now. Having said all that, I would be very interested to see a feature- comparison chart between FreeBSD, pkgsrc, and OpenBSD ports. mcl * pkgsrc: 10086 per ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/README-all.html * FreeBSD: 22758 per http://portsmon.freebsd.org/portsoverall.py