Date: Tue, 13 Sep 2011 18:52:32 +0200 From: Matthias Andree <matthias.andree@gmx.de> To: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Thank you (for making the ports less boring). Message-ID: <4E6F8A50.9060205@gmx.de> In-Reply-To: <1315905051.1747.208.camel@xenon> References: <1315864556.1747.103.camel@xenon> <20110912190558.641a3219@seibercom.net> <20110912230943.GD33455@guilt.hydra> <4E6E99BC.4050909@missouri.edu> <1315905051.1747.208.camel@xenon>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Am 13.09.2011 11:10, schrieb Michal Varga: > On Mon, 2011-09-12 at 18:46 -0500, Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote: > >>> I found Michal Varga's critique snarky and unnecessarily sarcastic... >> >> I agree that it was unnecessarily sarcastic. We all make mistakes from >> time to time. Michal could have pointed out the mistake and still been >> nice about it. I know for myself that when I make a mistake like this >> that I feel bad enough as it is, and I don't need anyone rubbing it in. >> >> Stephen > > Honestly, I wasn't trying to pick on Gabor any specifically, because as > you say, mistakes can happen. > > But the sad part of the story is that we're in 2011 and these kinds of > mistakes still happen, over and over, till absurdity. And not just > "still", they grow by magnitudes which now feels like from month to > month, from week to week (and I'm not going to be experiencing this here > when it finally hits the "days" scale, followed by an implosion of the > Universe). > > I'm not writing about this for the first time (in fact this is for the > last time, so hey, at least there's something on a positive note), but > it has gradually become nigh impossible to use FreeBSD as a modern > desktop workstation over the recent years, and especially this last year > has become a true nightmare. > > It would be pointless to simply repeat what I already said in those > previous discussions about the current - and very poor - ports quality > (or more specifically, total lack of quality control procedures), and it > would just get ignored again anyway (pretty good pointer being that at > about the same time as the last such thread spawned, just some random > bikeshedding discussion about a proper use of academic english in ports > or whatever pointless crap generated ten-times the same content over > like, 5 minutes tops. Because it's good to have some priorities > straight.) > > And if it wasn't Gabor's commit that again brought my OS down to > unusable level, it would be the one next week, or if we are lucky, two > to three weeks from now (but that would be probably this year's record). > Because the current procedures in place not only encourage these kinds > of mistakes, they downright call for them. Because there are no > procedures whatsoever. Not in the ecosystem-wide sense. Not the ones > that are crucial to make the OS actually work as a whole. But hey, I'm > not going to reiterate all that over again. It's been said. > > Just that before someone tells me again that I should not upgrade my > ports so frequently, or that I should make (shlib, or any other) backups > before any and every update (how is it that after a decade with ports > such novel idea didn't even cross my mind?), or that I should keep > sending patches every time my system is down again (because that's > obviously the most perfect time to start checking if the update actually > works), or that I should just go install PC-BSD... > > ...seriously guys? > > ...SERIOUSLY? > > Every time I visit my favorite restaurant, I should probably wait for a > few hours too, quietly watching if someone didn't die of food poisoning > before I finally order for myself, or that I should dig some old food > from the fridge and just bring it over as a backup, or heck, just leave > it be and simply order a pizza. Right? Are there still any more useful > suggestions this time? If so, please, don't make them. Just don't. > > So there's just one more thing I will add and I'm done with it all > (after all, I have some desktop migrations ahead of me and those penguin > boxes still won't plan and install themselves, even in 2011): > > On Tue, 2011-09-13 at 01:01 +0200, Gabor Kovesdan wrote: >> Btw, from your long mail I see you have lots of free time. You should >> think of spending that better than writing such long mails. Think about >> being a FreeBSD volunteer. ;) > > Yes, only if I wasn't spending all my free time constantly fixing new > breakages from latest port upgrades. I can easily see why so many people > think that the whole situation is actually pretty funny, or on the > opposite, that no 'situation' with ports even exists at all. Picking > just randomly here: > > ## From: Gabor Kovesdan <gabor@FreeBSD.org> > ## Mailer: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:9.0a1) > > ## From: Stephen Montgomery-Smith <stephen@missouri.edu> > ## Mailer: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.2.21) > > [and watching this on a full-list scale is truly a sight to behold] > > Sadly, as an actual FreeBSD desktop user, I don't have the luxury to > just keep politely filing PRs over and over or compile packs of patches > every time a new untested port breaks everything, because by the time > I'm done fixing all the failures (or more probably, still looking for > some ways on how to resolve the remaining ones), my day is long over, > and I sometimes need to even use those FreeBSD boxes as they were meant > to be in the first place. I beg to cast a different vote here. I can say that, thanks to tools like portmaster and better documentation (of course anything can still improve), the overall experience is that as a desktop it is quite usable as far as ports are concerned these days, and I feel it has improved a lot. There have been regressions, like Skype not working on 8.2 unless you happen to have a Skype 2.0 tarball around, and there were a few weeks where you'd need to use a supported older Firefox release series if you wanted it to run the Java plugin, but by and large the experience is quite different, and better, from the days when I was running 5.X or 6.X.
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?4E6F8A50.9060205>