Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 18:46:54 -0700 From: David Johnson <djohnson@acuson.com> To: freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Subject: Unstable Ports (a rant) Message-ID: <38F6788E.5A87AB3C@acuson.com>
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Just how stable is 4.0? How stable is FreeBSD in general? I have no problems with the core stuff. I think it's number one. But the quality of the ports is annoying me. I'll keep FreeBSD around for portability development for my own applications, but it's hard to say whether it will be my primary OS. I don't have multiple systems. I have only one system and it will have to work whether or not I happen to have my hacker hat on at the moment. Stange as it may sound, there are times that I DO NOT want to hack the code to get something to work. After getting 4.0 set up to where I want it, I started getting to work on the stuff that concerns me the most, the user level applications. I was very disappointed. An OS without usable apps is not a usable OS. Maybe it would be a good idea to mark individual ports as "stable", "unstable" or "quirky". I have none of these problems with Linux using the exact same applications. Somehow I get the impression that a successful compile is all the port maintainers require. Specifics include: xmms segfaulting with extreme frequency. This wouldn't have been much of a problem if I could get another GUI mod player to work. But I couldn't. GTK pixmap themes require ImageMagick for image conversion, and further expect to see convert under the root directory and not under /usr/local/bin. Sound under KDE is very sporadic. This isn't the sound card, because when I do get sound, it works fine. The problem is that I don't always get sound. An extreme example of this is KPoker. Qt-1.45 was not compiled with gif support, which is not a problem in and of itself, but there are KDE applications that use gif. Try running KSame! In addition, Qt-1.45 is an inappropiate version to use. This was a minor bugfix release for the sole use of Corel. TrollTech does not recommend anyone else using it. I could go on, but I'll stop now. I'm certain that a lot of these problems can be attributed to "linuxisms" and linux-only developers. But that's not really an excuse. If there's something wrong with a port, let me know about it beforehand. It shouldn't be my job to figure out why kppp was hanging my system. My feeling is that the FreeBSD team spends very little time on the ports. It's almost as if they were tacked on at the last minute. This is all well and good if the system is only going to be a gateway or a development box. But it won't cut it if they want FreeBSD to be considered as a potential desktop OS. Or am I way off base in expecting FreeBSD to work for my desktop box? If you haven't noticed, *BSD is starting to get a lot of attention recently. Now is not the time to fall asleep at the wheel. David Johnson To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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