From owner-freebsd-current Sat Aug 2 14:14:24 1997 Return-Path: Received: (from root@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) id OAA14446 for current-outgoing; Sat, 2 Aug 1997 14:14:24 -0700 (PDT) Received: from genghis.eng.demon.net (genghis.eng.demon.net [193.195.45.10]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id OAA14435 for ; Sat, 2 Aug 1997 14:14:18 -0700 (PDT) Received: from genghis.eng.demon.net [193.195.45.10] by genghis.eng.demon.net with esmtp (Exim 1.62 #1) id 0wulUw-00009C-00; Sat, 2 Aug 1997 22:14:02 +0100 To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" cc: current@freebsd.org Subject: Re: ports-current/packages-current discontinued Organization: Demon Internet Ltd. Reply-To: ade@demon.net In-reply-to: Your message of "Sat, 02 Aug 1997 13:58:14 PDT." <16217.870555494@time.cdrom.com> Date: Sat, 02 Aug 1997 22:14:02 +0100 From: Ade Lovett Message-Id: Sender: owner-freebsd-current@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk "Jordan K. Hubbard" writes: > >I think you're suffering from a fundamental misunderstanding of how >these things work. :-) Well, yes and no :) I freely admit to being more "corporately-aware" than how things are necessarily done with the core teams of the various *BSD's out in the world. However, at certain critical points in any products lifespan, there are certain key decisions that do have to be made which will have a major impact on the future. I believe that issues raised with regards to the tcl thing are now showing that a critical period has been reached and something "has to be done"[tm] about it. In an ideal world, everybodies point of view could be considered, the pro's and con's of each suggestion weighed up, and a decision reached. Unfortunately, design-by-large-committee very rarely (if at all) works effectively. For this reason, and this reason alone, I suggested that the core-team "mandate" an appropriate decision simply because they're an identifiable and small entity. Perhaps "mandate" was the wrong word to use, though I can't for the life of me think what the right word is :) >So it's really the other way around - until a truly defensible system >of package layering and installation is both proposed and proven >through some set of Makefile diffs which demonstrate the viability of >the concept, it's moot. I'm not entirely sure that it's going to be as simple as a set of Makefile diffs though :( For example, if one considers the approach of a FreeBSD-base + FreeBSD-approved-packages system, then substantial changes would have to be made to the entire source tree. Whether such changes would take the top-level form of a set of changes to allow "make world-base" and "make world-all", or two entirely separate source trees for base and approved-packages, or some other method, we're talking about an enormous amount of work for a proof-of-concept system, especially with the constant changing of the source trees themselves. We live in interesting times. -aDe -- Ade Lovett, Demon Internet Ltd.