Hello John,
I'll answer this sideways, because this thread has gotten a bit heated
and it's starting to wake some bad daemons.
W dniu 8.05.2025 o 01:05, John W pisze:
I know that using binary packages is popular these days, and that poudriere
exists, too. But I still generally have been managing my ports via 'make
install' and/or portmaster (which uses the same, under the hood).
no. they are not the same. Please consider portmaster as a workshop
tool, and poudriere as the template of the factory.
But I had a strange interaction in a bug report, recently [1], which makes me
wonder: is this old style of managing ports no longer well-supported?
Quote from that link from bofh@:
And to be frank for end users; ports is not the way to go. It's
binary pkgs or poudriere for your custom builds. If you want to try
ports/portmaster/portupgrade seek help from forums or mailing lists not
as a bug report.
Please don't blame bofh@, he is one of the most active committers[1].
It's just a waste of time to demand from the committers adapt the
production line in the pkg factory to be 100% compliant with the old
toolchain. While using ports tree directly to build packages is still
supported, this support is no longer the main scope of developing ports
tree. As a user, I greatly appreciate this effort of the committers to
keep the ports tree available for hobbyists and the opportunity to build
ports by hand.
[1] Source: FreeBSD status reports
As far as I am able to tell, the behavior I described *is* a bug with
that port. But the fact that it manifests via 'make config' and
soforth seemed to be a reason for it to not be considered a bug?
Probably not a bug, perhaps only mild inconsistency and incompatibility
with the old toolchain. I was also using make install in the 1990s, and
portmaster 10 years ago, but now I'd rather not use them anymore since
the world has moved on.
As I understand it, bofh@ is a senior FreeBSD person, so presumably
they know more about it than I do. But I could not find a way to make
sense of their response without the impression that make-based
workflows are not supported, these days.
I don't know bofh@ personally, but he doesn't strike me as any BOFH.
Just curious if anyone else has some high-level insights on this
situation. I've been using 'make install' for like 15+ years and it
seems weird to get this sort of response from ports maintainers.
-John
[1] https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=286659#c4
Thank you, on behalf of the FreeBSD community, for reporting this
inconvenience and publicising the issue, and for using FreeBSD for so
many years with its excellent ports tree and all its shortcomings.
Cheers
--
Marek Zarychta
