Nick Holland wrote:
UpGRADING (changing functionality, changing version numbers) from source is HARD. Having thousands of people thinking they should be able to build a new version from some arbitrary old version by source is a leading cause of developer hair loss, and helping those people would waste an incredible amount of developer time.
Why is is hard? If I pull the complete sources from cvs, so that every file used in the Makefiles is present and up to date, the build process would be just as trivial I assume. In what case would this _not_ be true?
(I'm really trying to understand where the risk is)
ON THE OTHER HAND, upDATING (patching) by source is trivial. It Just Works (when you follow the directions).
Yes, I updated a 3.9 yesterday, and it worked fine. Updating from source would be just as easy (but quicker). So I understand that it's more a lack of resources and that you'd be just as fine with binary upgrades if they were officially supported.
Which raises a second question - why are packages used for additional software but not for OpenBSD core?
Regards, -pu
