From owner-freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Sep 13 12:03:49 2011 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [IPv6:2001:4f8:fff6::34]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id ACA921065674; Tue, 13 Sep 2011 12:03:49 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from stephen@missouri.edu) Received: from wilberforce.math.missouri.edu (wilberforce.math.missouri.edu [128.206.184.213]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5BE038FC15; Tue, 13 Sep 2011 12:03:49 +0000 (UTC) Received: from [127.0.0.1] (wilberforce.math.missouri.edu [128.206.184.213]) by wilberforce.math.missouri.edu (8.14.4/8.14.4) with ESMTP id p8DC3lAm038774; Tue, 13 Sep 2011 07:03:48 -0500 (CDT) (envelope-from stephen@missouri.edu) Message-ID: <4E6F46A3.4080809@missouri.edu> Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2011 07:03:47 -0500 From: Stephen Montgomery-Smith User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.21) Gecko/20110831 Thunderbird/3.1.13 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Michal Varga References: <1315864556.1747.103.camel@xenon> <20110912190558.641a3219@seibercom.net> <20110912230943.GD33455@guilt.hydra> <4E6E99BC.4050909@missouri.edu> <1315905051.1747.208.camel@xenon> In-Reply-To: <1315905051.1747.208.camel@xenon> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: Gabor Kovesdan , "freebsd-ports@freebsd.org" Subject: Re: Thank you (for making the ports less boring). X-BeenThere: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Porting software to FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2011 12:03:49 -0000 On 09/13/2011 04:10 AM, Michal Varga wrote: > > And if it wasn't Gabor's commit that again brought my OS down to > unusable level, it would be the one next week, or if we are lucky, two > to three weeks from now (but that would be probably this year's record). > Because the current procedures in place not only encourage these kinds > of mistakes, they downright call for them. Because there are no > procedures whatsoever. Not in the ecosystem-wide sense. Not the ones > that are crucial to make the OS actually work as a whole. But hey, I'm > not going to reiterate all that over again. It's been said. Hi Michal, I see where you are coming from. I just recently became a ports committer. Before, when I would submit ports, there were certain mistake consistently made by the committers. Now that I am a committer, I can see how the tools used by the committers would lead to these consistent mistakes. In particular, checking which ports depend on a port just updated is a particularly nasty thing to do. I get the impression that each committer has his own special way of doing this. For example, I have personally found that a simple grep won't work, because "grep xxx /usr/ports/*/Makefile*" just creates a line too long for the shell to handle. I use a shell construction involving "find" but I wonder how others do the same thing. My day job is taking a lot of my time right now. But when things start to calm down, I'll start thinking about changes to the ecosystem of FreeBSD ports committing, and creating a set of more unified tools for the other ports committers to look at. Finally, I did notice that since the overheated conversation of a few weeks ago, that a couple of people who wanted to update ports did contact me first. This is because I maintain ports that depend on their proposed update. So maybe your complaints are being heard, at least on one level. Best regards, Stephen