Date: Wed, 15 Sep 2004 17:02:06 -0400 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Cc: Jack Stone <jacks@sage-american.com> Subject: Re: Drop of portindex Message-ID: <p0611041cbd6e58d22b84@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <200409151833.55714.michaelnottebrock@gmx.net> References: <20040915093120.3067472e@dolphin.local.net> <3.0.5.32.20040915104438.01f2dda0@sage-american.com> <200409151833.55714.michaelnottebrock@gmx.net>
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> > At 11:21 AM 9.15.2004 -0400, Adam Weinberger wrote: > > > >> >Let it be, people, and stop attacking other developers. > > > > > ># Adam I agree. Someone else wrote: > > Obviously, we all won't agree, but I think you should be more > > concerned about the damages this did to the ports' credibility. > > Up until now, I have always "trusted" the ports -- some of that > > has diminished because of this episode. I think this one example (out of 10,000 ports) just has a few unfortunate things related to it. One problem is the bug in bdb (in the base system) that many users suddenly hit while using portupgrade. The second problem was a few people reacted to this by promoting portindex as the solution, simply because they liked the port. Why was that a problem? Because it suddenly made portindex look like it was an *official* part of the Ports collection. Not just some random program which was inside the ports collection, but a program that everyone should use *for* installing ports. This brought a flood of new users, and that apparently triggered some problems for the developer. We can not police the licenses of every port in a collection of 10,000 (and growing!) ports, but I do think we should be more careful when it comes to promoting packages to all users of the ports collection. Unfortunately, the "we" in that last paragraph includes a lot of people, including many people who are not the official developers of "the ports collection". Perhaps this means that the ports collection will need to police the licenses of anything which claims to operate on the ports collection, just to avoid this confusion. I do not know what the best solution would be. Disclaimer: Note that I am *not* a ports-developer. But I am sure the people who do work on the ports-collection are trying to decide what (if anything) needs to be done about this. -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu
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