From owner-freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG Sat Mar 22 23:15:42 2014 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [8.8.178.115]) (using TLSv1 with cipher ADH-AES256-SHA (256/256 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id B04D02EF for ; Sat, 22 Mar 2014 23:15:42 +0000 (UTC) Received: from mail-lb0-x230.google.com (mail-lb0-x230.google.com [IPv6:2a00:1450:4010:c04::230]) (using TLSv1 with cipher ECDHE-RSA-RC4-SHA (128/128 bits)) (No client certificate requested) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 385C01E1 for ; Sat, 22 Mar 2014 23:15:42 +0000 (UTC) Received: by mail-lb0-f176.google.com with SMTP id 10so2631242lbg.21 for ; Sat, 22 Mar 2014 16:15:40 -0700 (PDT) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=gmail.com; s=20120113; h=mime-version:sender:in-reply-to:references:from:date:message-id :subject:to:content-type; bh=Xt4blbnf4dV0IWFFYCq6i7NGS2Nq0WEdVhMYgYt2sWU=; b=Tq0ZWwFswDEZceyHT0ou6RUL5N50M5J2Y86S2xNMlkZ3XswDJvMN3uQFFfJcA6NICQ P5rftPgVl3bnz0bBuiZ7Z2WSdJAjiGkQ/cwMauBkeE6M/hXP9VMWJ+/VScU4h62Kp+4Y +9s5svMGmbDQGtbNZhxD937e6N8kY3el0tUGnrbbbvrxB7Y5qk3fsfygCeZgITLVl5y3 NVTQ9RJVB7znTu9A17gmpqiBsAlQ6GLJpkrWE8Gn4lJN4xQWplr7Zf3qyyw32Rw++roF OpRRSozRPP2D7bN1fLzVhBOEHruPyl+fvYpvlxPez4jQQYPs/9QBpYNstfN2lBd/Smwe YkGA== X-Received: by 10.152.1.8 with SMTP id 8mr39202320lai.1.1395530140358; Sat, 22 Mar 2014 16:15:40 -0700 (PDT) MIME-Version: 1.0 Sender: royce.williams@gmail.com Received: by 10.112.1.33 with HTTP; Sat, 22 Mar 2014 16:15:20 -0700 (PDT) In-Reply-To: References: <53287821.4040209@freebsd.org> <5328A03A.3000305@freebsd.org> <532DD2EB.1080204@freebsd.org> <532DD64B.9000905@freebsd.org> <532DD978.3010502@freebsd.org> <532DDC51.7030807@freebsd.org> From: Royce Williams Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 15:15:20 -0800 X-Google-Sender-Auth: inkQllCE6zL9hRTSURqxodXEZpM Message-ID: Subject: Re: reason 23 why we've moved to linux To: FreeBSD Mailing List Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 X-BeenThere: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.17 Precedence: list List-Id: Porting software to FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 22 Mar 2014 23:15:42 -0000 On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 11:14 AM, Randy Bush 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