From owner-freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG Sun May 14 11:05:25 2006 Return-Path: X-Original-To: ports@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id C94C116A402; Sun, 14 May 2006 11:05:25 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from past@ebs.gr) Received: from fly.ebs.gr (fly.ebs.gr [83.171.239.113]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2565F43D45; Sun, 14 May 2006 11:05:24 +0000 (GMT) (envelope-from past@ebs.gr) Received: from ebs.gr (root@hal.ebs.gr [10.1.1.2]) by fly.ebs.gr (8.12.9p1/8.12.9) with ESMTP id k4EB54GP070687; Sun, 14 May 2006 14:05:04 +0300 (EEST) (envelope-from past@ebs.gr) Received: from [10.1.1.200] (pptp.ebs.gr [10.1.1.200]) by ebs.gr (8.13.3/8.13.3) with ESMTP id k4EB4wvv036740; Sun, 14 May 2006 14:05:03 +0300 (EEST) (envelope-from past@ebs.gr) Received: from 127.0.0.1 (AVG SMTP 7.1.392 [268.5.6/338]); Sun, 14 May 2006 14:04:55 +0300 Message-ID: <44670ED7.7050602@ebs.gr> Date: Sun, 14 May 2006 14:04:55 +0300 From: Panagiotis Astithas Organization: EBS Ltd. User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.2 (Windows/20060308) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: fbsd@a1poweruser.com References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Cc: ports@freebsd.org, "freebsd-questions@FreeBSD. ORG" Subject: Re: Has the port collection become to large to handle. X-BeenThere: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Porting software to FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sun, 14 May 2006 11:05:26 -0000 fbsd wrote: > So people them use the packages. But the problem with the > packages is they are not updated every time changes are > made to the port they were created from. Also packages that > have dependants like php4/php5 or mysql4/mysql5 are not being > updated to use the newer versions of those dependants as they come > out. I believe that one solution to the scalability problem of creating and maintaining updated packages, would be to decentralize it more. Each time I submit an update for one of the ports I maintain, I've already build the relevant packages, as a QA measure. There should be no need to wait for the ports cluster to build the official version, instead of using my own, modulo perhaps the higher quality assurance you'd get from Kris's build infrastructure. This is what you usually get in the Windows/Mac/Linux world. Macromedia, for instance, provides their own packages for Flash, naturally. The Eclipse foundation provides binary packages for, say Linux, but Red Hat has chosen to provide its own rpm's from their repo. What if we taught pkg_add to use something like INDEX, instead of a global PACKAGESITE variable, to hold information about each port's remote site? What if this was the secondary site, while the freebsd.org one remained the primary? This way you'd try to get the "official" package first and if you failed to find it, you'd get the maintainer's copy. Many people (myself included) have been doing something similar for GNOME and KDE, by asking portupgrade to try the marcuscom and fruitsalad repositories first. Or how about we don't consume the cluster's capacity for building packages, but just for QA? Why not require me (the maintainer) to send-pr a URL to fetch the package's from and store them in the cluster (or straight to ftp-master)? Of course this would not work for people without the means to host the packages, or for unmaintained ports. We'd still have to use the ports cluster for them. For the security paranoid, add a big fat warning, that the contents of these packages are not verified or endorsed by the project. Maybe even, use two download locations: one for packages built by the cluster and another for packages submitted by the maintainers. IIUC, most Linux distributions have a similar arrangement. Bottom line, since the package building role is becoming unbearable (at least for a timely delivery) for the project, why not let the ones who are already creating packages on their own, share the burden? Regards, Panagiotis P.S.: it hasn't escaped me that using packages created from different systems could present dependency mismatches. But I would argue that this should be the maintainer's concern and moreover, it is something that is deemed acceptable in other systems. Furthermore, one could always use the ports system if he prefers.