Date: Sun, 03 Aug 1997 03:20:12 +1000 From: David Nugent <davidn@labs.usn.blaze.net.au> To: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au> Cc: asami@cs.berkeley.edu (Satoshi Asami), andreas@klemm.gtn.com, ports@FreeBSD.ORG, current@FreeBSD.ORG, stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: ports-current/packages-current discontinued Message-ID: <199708021720.DAA00921@labs.usn.blaze.net.au> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 02 Aug 1997 19:43:14 %2B0930." <199708021013.TAA09852@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au>
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> > There are only two ways out of this, as far as I can tell; remove tcl > > from the base system (pst has done most of the work for this), or > > completely ignore the one in the base system and always use tcl from > > the ports collection (I'm not sure how hard this is -- we may need an > > enhanced version of LIB_DEPENDS or something). > > The correct answer to this is, of course, that any port that requires > a specific Tcl version or range of versions should require one of > those versions out of the ports collection. A port failing to operate > regardless of the Tcl version in the base distribution is > _fundamentally_broken_, and should be fixed. This is a gross over-simplification. The ports collection cannot ignore the rest of the system on which it is installed. That's the whole point of this discussion. Well, perhaps it isn't that much of an over-simplification, if you consider that all of these problems are fixed if you remove tcl from the base dist, in -current and in 2.2-stable as well (yes, this would be a lot of work, and yes, I'll volunteer to help). Just out of curiosity, why exactly was tcl8.0 *beta* added to the base distribution? I saw a message from Jordan which said "this will make my life easier" giving rather obscure reasons, but I can't express the amazement I experienced when I first saw the commit. This upgrade has caused me no end of problems, since it broke many tcl and tk apps I run on several systems. Yes, sure, this is -current, and we have to live with these inconveniences, but I'd be far more comfortable living with this particular inconvenience if the end result was the removal of tcl from the base distribution altogether, and moving it to ports. This is not an anti-tcl stance, but the opposite; I use tcl/tk widely myself, but I'd far prefer to track versions through the ports system than have to rely on the base distribution staying up-to-date, purely because many apps require different versions. The same with perl. The base distribution is simply not the place for these things; surely that much is obvious by now? Upgrading the base system's version to an untested beta with some very significant internal changes, even in -current, is the most stupid move I have seen in the FreeBSD project since my involvement. I can count the number of such incidents I've witnessed in the last couple of years on one hand, so it's not like the project is infested with stupidity. It was very ill-considered, and Satoshi's position here is critical. That he apparently got no say in this is incredible, to say the least. It seems obvious to an outsider that there are some very fundamental communication problems within the core team. Seeing this fixed is even more critical than where tcl or perl happen to reside. Regards, David -- David Nugent - Unique Computing Pty Ltd - Melbourne, Australia davidn@freebsd.org davidn@blaze.net.au http://www.blaze.net.au/~davidn/
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