From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Apr 14 22:08:28 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id WAA20516 for freebsd-hackers-outgoing; Tue, 14 Apr 1998 22:08:28 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from spinner.netplex.com.au (spinner.netplex.com.au [202.12.86.3]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id FAA20400; Wed, 15 Apr 1998 05:08:01 GMT (envelope-from peter@netplex.com.au) Received: from spinner.netplex.com.au (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by spinner.netplex.com.au (8.8.8/8.8.8/Spinner) with ESMTP id NAA24706; Wed, 15 Apr 1998 13:07:18 +0800 (WST) (envelope-from peter@spinner.netplex.com.au) Message-Id: <199804150507.NAA24706@spinner.netplex.com.au> X-Mailer: exmh version 2.0.2 2/24/98 To: "Matthew N. Dodd" cc: Satoshi Asami , phk@FreeBSD.ORG, committers@FreeBSD.ORG, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Come on guys, close a PR or two, will ya ? In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 15 Apr 1998 00:42:44 -0400." Date: Wed, 15 Apr 1998 13:07:16 +0800 From: Peter Wemm Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG "Matthew N. Dodd" wrote: > On Tue, 14 Apr 1998, Satoshi Asami wrote: > > I am not against making our collection more friendly to other *BSD > > systems, but with the logistics and stuff that's involved, I don't think > > it's likely that it will reduce our load any.... > > Coordinating all the system dependent bits is likely to increase load. I > am not saying otherwise. However, this cost is offset by the potentially > larger base of ports maintainers drawn from all 3 projects. Well, the first set of differences that I can think of: - Man page names in PLIST's.. The other BSD's don't gzip the pages, that causes PLIST problems. - Shared library naming strategies. We're going to have this soon when we hit elf too. - Dependencies on the base system. For example the p5-* ports would have trouble with OpenBSD's use of perl5 in the base tree. We will probably have this problem too some time. The other BSD's have things like libwrap and identd in the base tree as well, NetBSD has no perl at all, so things like /usr/bin/perl can't automatically be used. - Locations of system critical files. OpenBSD at least puts security and system critical etc files in /etc where they belong rather than patching everything to /usr/local/etc. They do not put these files in PLIST's so that they survive a pkg_delete prior to a new version being installed. - Naming issues. DESCR files etc refer to FreeBSD by name, patch files patch in "FreeBSD" into things, etc. - Political issues. Who runs the show? Do all NetBSD/OpenBSD committers automatically get commit rights to the ports tree the same way the FreeBSD folks do? Presumably the ports tree would move to a seperate CVS repository with seperate commit and access lists? On a seperate machine to minimize the political friction of having all parties having accounts on the same machine? How can ports be tested cross-platform? Three build/ test machines, one for each OS, available to all ports commiters? What about pre-release ports tree freezes? - those inconvenience 2 parties. This probably means branching the tree for each release by each OS. - Policies like 'the ports tree supports 2.2-stable and not -current' become nonsensical as the inter-os differences are generally far greater than the 2.2/3.0 differences. - Probably a zillion other things. Much of this could probably be dealt with by bsd.port.mk, but where the PLIST is concerned there is a problem as there doesn't seem to be an easy way of doing some sort of pre-processing of the PLIST to counter things like manpage compression policy. IMHO, this already is a problem as we can't package things with no man page compression ourselves. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see it happen, but the question is.. is there sufficient willpower and energy to make it work and put out the fires during the teething process? Cheers, -Peter -- Peter Wemm Netplex Consulting To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message