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Date:      Fri, 21 Jul 2000 07:44:42 -0500 (CDT)
From:      Joe Greco <jgreco@ns.sol.net>
To:        alex@big.endian.de (Alexander Langer)
Cc:        ports@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: tcsh broken
Message-ID:  <200007211244.HAA17970@aurora.sol.net>
In-Reply-To: <20000721134446.A11819@cichlids.cichlids.com> from Alexander Langer at "Jul 21, 2000  1:44:46 pm"

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> Thus spake Joe Greco (jgreco@ns.sol.net):
> > #! /bin/sh -
> > sed 's:6.09.01:6.09.03:' < Makefile > Makefile.tmp
> > mv Makefile.tmp Makefile
> > rm -fr patches
> 
> What's wrong with the patches?
> Have they been merged?

When I'm sitting on the floor in a production machine room at 11:30pm at
night after an all-day adventure in moving and hacking, and I've got to
be on a plane the next morning (i.e. this morning) at 8:30am (one hour
from now), I generally don't take the time to figure out which of the
normally gratuitous FreeBSD patches are causing the build to freak.  My
pet theory (even proven true from time to time) is that most software is
designed to compile "out-of-the-tarball" and that most port patches 
are typically seen to enforce FreeBSD-correctness, such as 
/usr/local->${PREFIX} and fixing silly compiler warnings caused by bad
coding, neither of which I care about.

So I don't really know but I can tell you that I get a usable tcsh if I
follow the above easy-to-remember set of steps.  :-)

I realize that it is impossible for the ports folks to keep track of
every package and make sure that the available release is the one
referenced.  I curse authors who take down old release tarballs when
there is something newer available, and of course you guys have no
control over that.  But I sort of wish that the older tarball (i.e.
6.09.01 in this case) would reliably get mirrored on wcarchive, 
somehow, and this would go a long way to solving some of the frustration
that many people around here have when various ports suddenly stop
building.  I've been converting some hard-core Linux folks to FreeBSD,
largely because I've got automated installation scripts which take a
system from scratch to hardened, secured server platform with
appropriate local customizations and ports, and the constant breaking
of various ports is by far THE largest impediment to the process.  It
means that I often have to roll out the boxes myself, rather than
letting a junior sysadmin do it, because I know how to fix most various
forms of broken ports.  My process only takes 35 minutes per server from
blank HD to fini on a PIII-550, but we have lots of servers...

This is not meant in anger, as I realize you guys do fantastic work,
and many of the problems are due to circumstances beyond your control.
I'm just venting :-)
-- 
... Joe

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Joe Greco - Systems Administrator			      jgreco@ns.sol.net
Solaria Public Access UNIX - Milwaukee, WI			   414/342-4847


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