I'm usual the cynical one around here, but I actually think this is
because MacPorts has been putting a lot of time, lately, into
improving its infrastructure rather than focusing on continuously
adding (and subsequently maintaining) ports through sheer brute-force.
FreeBSD has over 15,000 ports largely because they put a huge amount
of time into building all their ports on a regular basis, collecting
the build results, and making regular status information available to
maintainers (see http://portsmon.freebsd.org/) so that the overall
collection does not become completely unmanageable.
I think the new MP crew has seen that there's still a lot of work to
do in QA, making port descriptions more powerful and/or concise, and
implementing commonly requested features in order to support future
ports that don't fit into the current system very well, and they've
wisely chosen to focus on these things rather than just expanding the
collection. That's a good thing. :-)
That said, I don't think anyone is actively discouraging anyone from
adding more ports, it's just a question of where the focus is right
now. There has been quite a lot of work put into cleaning up and
adding ports, a lot of time also going into figuring out how to use
the new trac system at macosforge and adapting the project's
processes to fit the new infrastructure.
- Jordan
On Apr 30, 2007, at 12:53 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Okay, this may seem like a silly question, but it seems the the
rate of
new ports has tapered off and we're treading water at near 4000.
No doubt
that will creep up slowly, but I see Fink has roughly 8,000 and
FreeBSD
double that. Is that because they have more legacy software that
we don't
use? I just wonder what type of stuff they have that we don't,
especially
since it seems like we're not missing too much that people are
asking for.
What is it about our user base that makes us content with 1/2 the
number
of available ports? Or is it just me? Are we content with our
available
ports?
Mark
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