Date: Thu, 5 Jun 1997 18:25:37 -0700 (PDT) From: asami@cs.berkeley.edu (Satoshi Asami) To: jim@reptiles.org Cc: itojun@itojun.org, jhs@freebsd.org, committers@freebsd.org, hylafax@freebsd.org, gj@freebsd.org, ports@freebsd.org Subject: Re: ports/comms/hylafax Message-ID: <199706060125.SAA29193@silvia.HIP.Berkeley.EDU> In-Reply-To: <m0wZcOq-0003pcC@iguana.reptiles.org> (jim@reptiles.org)
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Thanks for your comments. * however, from a general user's perspective, it would be far greater for newish * versions of things to be added with a version number (ie. hylafax4, ncftp2, * perl5, etc) such that we, the normal users, have a choice of running the * old standby (even if it has bugs) or the newfangled port (even if it has bugs). I'm sorry, but those are more of special cases and not the rule. ncftp2 and perl5 are both newer versions of what is/has been in the main source tree. (There never would have been both ncftp1 and ncftp2 in the ports tree if ncftp1 wasn't in the main source tree before.) Things like tiff/tcl/tk have multiple versions because they are used by other ports and are/were necessary to ensure the integrity of the ports tree. Ghostscript[234] are there because the newer versions have licenses too limited for free corporate use. The others are stuff like gimp-devel, nn-current and vim5beta, which have not replaced the old version because the new ones are still in beta. When the new version comes out of beta, we intend to merge them into the old port. In general, we do not maintain multiple versions of the same port because it is too much work to do so. Note that for every port that's in the tree, even if it's an older version that nobody commits against anymore, we have to check tarballs, build packages and field bug reports. Having multiple versions of the same port also causes a whole lot of interesting problems (see the gs[234] binary mixup in 2.2-BETA packages for example) that we rather not have to worry about. Now for hylafax. It falls into none of the above special cases. It is an "oddball" port that requires me to take special action while building packages (it uses bash as shell, and chokes on my cd/rm exported functions so I need to stop and unset those), so having one more hylafax port means a lot more work for me whenever I build the packages (which happen about once a month -- it is now necessary with -current moving so fast and many things breaking left and right). Also, the new version (4.0 release, not beta) has come out in August of 1996. That is 10 months ago. The upgrade has been long overdue, I have asked several people who mentioned that they "got 4.0 working at home" to make a port, until finally itojun (three cheers to him!) came up with one. Since this particular port was first mentioned in a Japanese mailing list, we had some people test it there, and I committed the port after about a few weeks of "ok" reports and no "doesn't work" reports. Besides, the author has deleted the ver 3 tarball from his own site. I would trust his judgement more than anyone else's. * put plainly, i'm sure many of us appreciate the efforts put into maintaining * the ports collection, but let's not get into pissing contests over who has * control. then we all suffer. Amen. The "correct" procedure to deal with this was probably for me to strip the MAINTAINER=jhs line for neglecting to upgrade the port for so long, and then commit the new port, but what difference does that make? I didn't want to publically embarrass/accuse Mr. Stacey by making it an issue, and indeed thought I was doing him a favor by giving him a chance to silently watch from the sidelines while people do the work that he was expected to (and if you take a diff of the committed pkg/PLIST with the submitted version, you can see that *I* also did a lot of work to make it package correctly, one thing the old port never did). I guess that didn't work very well. Satoshi
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