On Fri, Dec 5, 2025 at 2:52 PM Daniel Engberg <[email protected]> wrote:

> The issue with this approach is that it breaks dependency tracking and
> expected behavior within in the ports repo, concerns which have been
> brought up before [1]. Indirectly it also show yet again that we need to
> have a sane deprecation policy within the tree. If port X doesn't build
> with a supported "compiler" it either needs to be patched (preferably
> upstream and the pulled in downstream) or it needs to go.
>
> If you install GCC 14 you don't except it to download and use GCC 11
> instead. While this might clash with Go(lang)'s idea of an ecosystem that's
> how we package ports and how people expect ports to work.
>
> Going with the information above why not patch go.mod on the fly to match
> the current compiler version being used? If it breaks patch or mark it as
> broken and move on.
>
> Best regards,
> Daniel
>
> 1: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D49906
>

I'm really not advocating for any particular approach other than that we
badly need to remove old Go versions, which are blocked by ports with
pinned versions. I really don't care how we handle version selection moving
forward (I mean, I *do* care, but right now I'm trying to clean up a mess
before it catches fire), and I'll happily go along with any consensus.

Right now we have a collection of ports that depend on Go versions that
absolutely shouldn't be in the tree, and in 3 months we are going to have
to do the same process with everything pinned to 1.24. And six months after
that, do it again with 1.25.

So far today I've handled one message cursing at me, five emails where
committers thought that petulant sarcasm would make them feel superior, two
emails accusing me of gaslighting developers, one email mocking a paste
error that took longer to write than fixing it would have, about 6 emails
asking for clarification (thanks to everyone who reached out!), I've lost
count of the number of messages about how the how the version system ought
to work, and one email from a committer saying they were offended that I
only provided a list of ports and it was too much work to remember which
port they maintained. I've had exactly one person reach out to say, "How
can I help?"

Daniel, I think your ideas are great, and I'm super eager for ANYONE to
step in and build a better system. Also, I appreciate your thoughtful
approach and constructive response.

Today, I'm trying to fix the problem of us providing Go versions that we
shouldn't. I'm happy to work on fixing everything else tomorrow, if we
could please work on the highest-priority item first and maybe---just
maybe---people could take a deep breath before sending me emails that are
barely more than curse words. I agree that everyone is a better developer
than me---I've said this publicly many times---so it doesn't take a flame
email or a dose of witty sarcasm to feel superior, ok? (To be clear, NONE
of those last sentences applies to diizzy in any way.)


-- 
Adam Weinberger
[email protected]

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