Date: Sun, 03 Aug 97 16:41:50 -0500 From: "Richard Seaman, Jr." <lists@tar.com> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> Cc: "freebsd-current@freebsd.org" <freebsd-current@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: Current is currently really a mess (was: Re: Tk/Tcl broken(?)) Message-ID: <199708032141.QAA19564@ns.tar.com>
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Hope you all don't mind a few comments from someone who is just a lowly "user". On Sun, 03 Aug 1997 12:55:53 -0700, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: >Perhaps we've lost sight of what the ports collection is there for >also. I always envisioned it as that "extra 10%", like comfortable >seats in your car or airbags in your dashboard. It makes the system >much nicer to use and adds polish for the user base. >From my standpoint, this vastly understates the importance of the "ports" collection. Without "ports", I wouldn't run FreeBSD. I wonder if there aren't a lot of users who may view it the same way? This doesn't mean that "ports" have to support both -current and the 2.2 branch. But, I'd feel a lot better about being committed to FreeBSD if I thought the core group placed the importance of the "ports" collection as a lot more than "that extra 10%". >I hate to say it, but I have now seriously come to question whether or >not you're the sort of person who should be running -current at all. >I realize that you want to play with SMP, but I think that maybe you >should have held off on that until it was ready for the non-developer >types. Ok. This wasn't directed at me. But, as a "non-developer" running -current, I feel like it could have been. I chose to switch from the 2.2 branch to -current a while back because I was concerned about certain aspects of the 2.2 branch support. 1) Some outside applications that were integrated into the main tree, eg. bind, were way out of date in 2.2. (Granted, shortly after I switched to current, bind 4.9.6 was merged into 2.2 -- though I think latest "official" 2.2-release is still at an ancient level). At various points, I've had similar issues with sendmail. There is still the per4 vs perl5 issue, though that exists in -current too. 2) I noticed that certain bug fixes were made more readily in -current than in 2.2. For example, you dropped kernel ppp out the the GENERIC kernel. So, when I was running 2.2 I tried switching to user ppp. Immediately I encountered bugs. Where did the bug fixes go? -current, not 2.2, till much later. 3) Sometimes, new hardware releases make it into -current but not into 2.2. Now, on these last two points, I recognise that -current is a place where bug fixes and new hardware should be tested before merging them into 2.2. But, I didn't perceive, rightly or wrongly, that these changes were getting into 2.2 in a timely manner, in some cases. I suspected that was because the developers were running -current and not 2.2. I think that a full blown committment to making "ports" work under the current release branch (currently 2.2) is a good thing. I really don't care what outside packages are incorporated into the base system, and which are in "ports", provided I have a relatively efficient way of incorporating the most recent bug-fixed, security-fixed version of these packages into the OS I'm running. The "ports" collection works pretty well for this. I don't perceive that the "outside packages" that have been incorporated into the base system have been handled nearly as well. Therefore, adding more such packages concerns me. There are two issues that need to be addressed: 1) Getting current (non-beta) versions of these packages into the releases. 2) Getting current version of these packages into the OS between OS releases when the packages are updated and out of sync with the OS release. This is more that just getting them into the most recent source tree. Having to CVSup and then "make world" isn't all that attractive for just upgrading a portion of the OS (eg. some outside package that has just had a security fix). You yourself have stated elsewhere that "make world" is probably not approriate for many users, as you've stated -current is not. As a user I'm concerned that incorporating more "outside packages" into the base OS, instead of into "ports", will lead to less well supported release code. I'd like to be wrong, and welcome having you convince me otherwise.
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