Date: Fri, 26 Jan 2001 15:39:35 -0500 From: "Matthew Emmerton" <matt@gsicomp.on.ca> To: "Gerald Pfeifer" <pfeifer@dbai.tuwien.ac.at>, "Will Andrews" <will@physics.purdue.edu> Cc: <freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: Policy problem (was: ports/19270: Ports build mechanism doesn't check whether /usr/ports/distfiles is writeable) Message-ID: <003701c087d8$1897ef70$1200a8c0@gsicomp.on.ca> References: <Pine.BSF.4.31.0101261819500.4474-100000@deneb.dbai.tuwien.ac.at>
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> On Fri, 5 Jan 2001, Will Andrews wrote: > > On Sat, Jan 06, 2001 at 01:28:28AM +0100, Gerald Pfeifer wrote: > >> What about this PR? It's more than half a year old, and I even included > >> a patch suggestion: <http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=19270>; > >> > >> That shouldn't take more than five minutes for someone familiar with the > >> port structure... > > I would have fixed this (and others as well) a long time ago, but only > > Satoshi can touch bsd.*.mk. That's current policy. > > This means that current policy is broken and should be fixed. > > Micromanagement hardly ever is a good idea, let alone in an open source > project. And having only one volunteer exclusively responsible for some > piece of code is A Bad Thing[tm]. I think it's a rather good idea to have Satoshi look after things. Take a look at the -stable or -current lists, and count the number of issues that arise because commiter A commited some code which breaks code/features committed by commiter B. This doesn't happen very often, but when it does, one could conclude that there is fear in the air until the situation is resolved. The reason why a multi-committer system works (for the most part) is because most areas of the source tree are sufficiently isolated from each other, so this situation doesn't occur very often. And when it does, it's usually resolved promptly. For the ports tree, things are vastly different. bsd.port.mk is one file which controls the entire ports tree. If someone commits something and it breaks some other functionality, then you will get a "hack and slash" effect, as various commiters attempt to a) fix the original problem but also b) fix the side effects of the original problem to restore functionality in the meantime. Since people tend to cvsup ports more often than -stable (I do ports every night, -stable bi-weekly), a broken ports subsystem will be much more noticeable and cause many more problems. Let's leave well enough alone, eh? -- Matt Emmerton To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-ports" in the body of the message
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