Date: Thu, 31 Jul 1997 23:01:28 -0700 (PDT) From: asami@cs.berkeley.edu (Satoshi Asami) To: current@freebsd.org, stable@freebsd.org Cc: ports@freebsd.org Subject: ports-current/packages-current discontinued Message-ID: <199708010601.XAA18505@silvia.HIP.Berkeley.EDU>
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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hi all, As I have mentioned in several places, I am now going to officially discontinue support of FreeBSD-current by the ports tree. The ports tree will now support FreeBSD-stable (the "2.2 branch"). As you know, the ports tree has always supported -current. Why change it now? Note that the "ports support -current" used to mean "ports support the next release" or "ports support the tree that is to become the next release, so we will have packages all built and ready when the release is made". It was true three years ago, when there was only one development tree (-current) that would become the next release. However, since then the tree was branched, the ports team has always been sandwiched between the need to support both -current and -stable. When the tree was initially branched, the promise was that the 2.1-stable branch was going to be short-lived and will only have one release, so we will just ship ports/packages from the previous CDROM. They will be only a few months old, and we'll move onto 2.2. Unfortunately, that didn't happen, the 2.1-stable tree lingered for almost two years until 2.2 was finally released (or 15 months since the 2.1 release), without getting any new support for ports. And we heard no end of it from the users, who upgraded from 2.1 to 2.1.5 and then 2.1.7 and still found the old moldy ports/packages in there. Or those who cvsup'd the ports tree and found that many things don't build on their system. Learning from that experience, we have tried to keep the ports tree compile both on 3.0-current and 2.2-stable when those two were branched. Many man-hours have gone into the tree for this effort, and we have succeeded to get it to work for more than half a year, despite some extensive changes in 3.0-current (like Garrett's network header updates). I have also provided a package containing the minimal set of utilities (the "2.2-stable upgrade kit") for 2.2.1R and 2.2.2R users so they can use the latest ports without even tracking 2.2-stable. Another thing I have done was to merge necessary changes from 3.0-current to 2.2-stable (e.g., install-info) to make the two systems reasonably close to each other. However, the recent rash of commits to the 3.0 branch without regards of consistency and compatibility with 2.2-stable made it necessary to make a decision. Also, it is often the case that -current doesn't even compile, which made it difficult for me to maintain a reasonable build machine. As we will have (at least) one more release from the 2.2-stable branch, it doesn't really make sense for us to follow the circus going on in 3.0-current now. We will make sure everything compiles and works in 2.2-stable, so when the next release comes out, we'll have a functional set of packgaes. (Also, people following -current are generally more capable of building stuff themselves. :) Note that the above doesn't mean we are not going to discontinue "#if __FreeBSD_version > ..." style of patches -- compatible porting in that manner has always been encouraged, and will continue to be so. (That will make it easier when we move over to that branch.) It just means that when it becomes impossible to support both branches without severe loads to our already scarce manpower and/or disgusting hacks, we will choose to support -stable. As many you have undoubtedly noticed, I am in the process of building packages for 2.2-stable and copying them to ftp.freebsd.org's new packages-stable directory. I will also move the ports tree on the ftp site from under "FreeBSD-current" to somewhere else to avoid confusion, and remove the "ports-current" symbolic link. The packages-current directory will eventually be deleted too (unless some kind soul steps forward to build them for me). This is truly a sad day. The irony of this all is that it really didn't have to happen, and it would have been possible for us to support both 3.0-current and 2.2-stable if more consideration has been made before some commits into -current. For instance, there is no reason why tcl-8.0beta2 had to go into the tree now, whether the tree is called -current or not. It is dubbed BETA of all things on the master site, and we haven't even had it in our ports area to test it. As some people have noted, there is no matching tk version in our ports tree either. The latest incident just reinforces my belief that it was a mistake in the first place to include something like tcl in the base distribution (note that it was also done without consensus back then), and one we may regret for a long time to come. Yours truly, Satoshi and the awesome Ports Team -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.2 iQCVAwUBM+F7mINA0SoeCNiJAQFxCgP/ZeTbsaIXqCgPOvBImJa3FOQdUjouo6IM jmbsoYqxgJc6bYZOPDxvyRWK2ne845FjHywSyssCNfQU82qgg2Vdot0JwXoKTGm/ 5x5ZG6nHCgRjXVEsEC6SqI3Aw9iwA0vgD+dRB5LLVhCMs/BbA5ejkSyxgq+RITKG LzQ6koCTHRg= =PHTA -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
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