Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2001 03:39:23 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Andrew Reilly <areilly@bigpond.net.au> Cc: Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org>, "Daniel O'Connor" <doconnor@gsoft.com.au>, arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Moving UUCP to ports Message-ID: <3BA875DB.8C1EA468@mindspring.com> References: <XFMail.20010918154737.doconnor@gsoft.com.au> <3BA6EB64.A4F9720C@mindspring.com> <20010917235356.A41864@xor.obsecurity.org> <3BA7A37E.93DA21B8@mindspring.com> <20010919095704.A14016@gurney.reilly.home>
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Andrew Reilly wrote: > > On Tue, Sep 18, 2001 at 12:41:50PM -0700, Terry Lambert wrote: > > Except that most of the people in the world don't have an FTP > > server, and the ISP links that they do have prevent them from > > running a server at all -- and it is *precisely* these people > > who need UUCP. > > Is there no possibility that the putative ports-based > distribution could live on FreeBSD's FTP server without being > part of the main tree? It already does, as long as you leave it alone. > There's sourceforge too, unless that has strings attached that I > haven't bothered to investigate. To be brutally blunt, sourceforge sucks. In its creation, it has this idealistic belief that open source projects can occur because someone declares an open source project, with nothing else. Even with the primary ingredient as a given, working code (something the Mozilla folks found out that you can't live without), their "infrastructure" system leaves a lot to be desired. Mostly, the cookie-cutter approach to a repository, project area, web pages, discussion groups, and so on, really failt to grasp the idea that open source projects are by their very nature individualistic, and have their own communities. The sourceforge approach is to place all of the projects in some bland "open source surburbia", where all of the houses are alike, with only the colors and minor style variations (which building plan was used for which particular house) are allowed by the restrictive covenants and local zoning laws. Sourceforege is the open source equivalent of the subdivision in the movie "Edward Scissorhands". So, IMO, moving a project to sourceforge is a quick way to kill it off. > > To your point about it "not having been maintained": I prefer > > to think of it as an "if it isn't broke, don't fix it". > > Isn't the issue that brokenness _has_ been identified? A security issue was identified, and is easily fixed, but rather than fixing it (disallowing "--config" except for group "wheel", for example), people now want to exile it to the land of the unmaintained and unmaintainable. If it's moved to ports, it will be about as maintained as the BSD code for various utilities which have had the misfortune to be replaced by GNU equivalents -- tar, diff, etc.. > > Can we move on to talking about making sendmail and perl into > > ports instead? > > Yes please. I realize that perl has a lot of support, and > that's not really ever going to happen. Sendmail I can already > turn off, so that doesn't worry me overly either. Perl belongs much less in the base system than UCP, which, for all it's faults, has a BSD license. UUCP is also very much smaller, and it's where the default terminal program for UNIX comes from, as well. > Ports dependancy issues and interactions with the main tree are > always fun discussion topics, though... :-) Annoying, you mean... -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
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