Chris Brennan wrote: > On 7/26/2011 3:28 PM, RW wrote: > > It seems more reasonable than the idea that most people using FreeBSD > > are doing so despite being "very unhappy with FreeBSD ports". If > > that's= > > > really true then we should give Beastie nipple-clamps and a ball-gag > > to= > > > better appeal to our key demographic. > > _______________________________________________ > > freebsd-ports@freebsd.org mailing list > > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports > > To unsubscribe, send any mail to > > "freebsd-ports-unsubscr...@freebsd.org= > " > > +1 just because the thought of that is funny as hell!
As a testimonial to the diabolical nature of FreeBSD yesterday i have installed a PC with FreeBSD-8.2 RELEASE, using the distributed packages (pkg_add -r). When installing gimp, something went south. After some checks it was avahi-app which refused to install, the reason being that pw groupadd -n avahi failed, with the message: "group disappeared during update" This from /usr/src/usr.sbin/pw/pw_group.c line 271. How is it that such an error, perhaps due to some concurrent access bug, happens in such an irregular way that it is still present since many years? In my installation, several other packages used pw to add to the group and passwd files (hald, etc.) but the error was triggered only by avahi-app, on the other hand it was 100% reproductible for avahi-app. I have seen this problem many times in the past. The only way i was able to proceed was to run pkg_add -I -r avahi-app after that the other dependencies of gimp and gimp itself installed OK. I don't remember that this error was blocking in this way in the past, but it is very worrisome, i don't see a beginner being able to cope with such problem. Still another problem in my installation i have an inn server which sucks news via newsx. Inn installed OK but newsx doesn't appear on the freebsd repository. I try to compile newsx, of course it fails. The reason? the inn installation lacks all the configuration files under /usr/local/news/etc ! More than that the conf files appear nowhere on the machine! How a user is supposed to figure out how to write such files without the models at hand? I have installed inn several times, i have never seen that. Some maintainer has found judicious to remove the conf files (perhaps to avoid overwriting a preexisting installation, but this is the bad way to solve the problem). Anyways, without etc/inn.conf, newsx cannot compile, since it picks its own configuration from inn.conf. So by doing this change the inn maintainer has broken newsx inadvertently, and of course no one noticed. This is emblematic of many other ports which are mismanaged, introduce tons of unnecessary dependencies which complicate everything, etc. For example, installing the port xorg installed things such as pyton and ruby which have zero relation with the problem at hand. It also installed perl but this is required for autoconfiguration of the server, i think. On the bright side, installing xorg produced a working X11 display without any configuration except running dbusd and hald. I have at least one positive point to report, for the first time i see printing working in wxMaxima, in the past either it didn't work at all or coredumped. So someone has understood the printing problem in the wx toolkit, this is nice. This post is ways too long, but i hope more informative that comments such as "Nuts" ushered by some phd student who apparently value himself at tremendous heights. As to the poster objection, one may very well use FreeBSD for some other qualities, even if one is not happy with the state of the ports system. And to the more general objection that all this is unrelated to the thread subject, portupgrade, it is *extremely* related, because no upgrading tool can work, be it portupgrade, portmaster, or whatever, in the presence of the sorts of bugs i have described above in the basic ports system. An obvious flaw of portupgrade is that it is very slow, other than that i think it is a pretty good program. Similarly portmaster is a brilliant example of shell scripting and works OK as far as i can see. The real problems are in the ports system itself. -- Michel TALON _______________________________________________ freebsd-ports@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-ports-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
