Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 15:15:20 -0800 From: Royce Williams <royce@tycho.org> To: FreeBSD Mailing List <freebsd-ports@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: reason 23 why we've moved to linux Message-ID: <CA%2BE3k92uJcuxqeDS0yyeGhWLKzvA_0u7tO0xwt9cGUfXp3GZEA@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <m2wqfmqc4c.wl%randy@psg.com> References: <m2iorb1ms8.wl%randy@psg.com> <53287821.4040209@freebsd.org> <m2ha6v1m4z.wl%randy@psg.com> <5328A03A.3000305@freebsd.org> <m261n6rtkf.wl%randy@psg.com> <532DD2EB.1080204@freebsd.org> <m238iart92.wl%randy@psg.com> <532DD64B.9000905@freebsd.org> <m2zjkiqds8.wl%randy@psg.com> <532DD978.3010502@freebsd.org> <m2y502qda9.wl%randy@psg.com> <532DDC51.7030807@freebsd.org> <m2wqfmqc4c.wl%randy@psg.com>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 11:14 AM, Randy Bush <randy@psg.com> wrote:
[snip]
> there will always be a few bugs. otoh, with freebsd ports, there may be
> a few working paths, but they are damned hard to find. and there is
> very viable competition. many long time freebsd users are leaving, yes
> sadly, but leaving. the window is closing.
I'm not endorsing Randy's bedside manner on this one ;-), but he's
correct that the pkg transition has been a bit of a POLA violation.
It assumes that people have the skill and time to hunt for shims and
workarounds.
pkg will be a great step forward for busy sysadmins -- but the
transition itself has been a failure of empathy for them. Some poor
guy hops on his FreeBSD box to get a vulnerability patched -- and
steps on a landmine of indeterminate time expenditure with few
breadcrumbs. Even if he *has* been monitoring the lists.
IMO, we should have waited until we could automatically handle common
failure modes of the transition.
To this day, I still have an 8.3 jail that complains:
pkg: PACKAGESITE in pkg.conf is deprecated. Please create a
repository configuration file
... but I don't actually have a pkg.conf in that jail, and 'grep -r
PACKAGESITE /' yields no hits.
And why tell someone to create a file, without including a recommended
path? Or better yet ... check to see if I already had one, and prompt
me to create one if I don't?
If FreeBSD built more tools that empathize with non-developers, they'd
have more time to develop. :-)
Royce
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?CA%2BE3k92uJcuxqeDS0yyeGhWLKzvA_0u7tO0xwt9cGUfXp3GZEA>