I'm happy to have a discussion about this topic either publicly, or
privately, your choice. Since your message went to -current@, that's
where my reply is headed. I've also cc'ed ports@ since the topic is
relevant there too.
Meanwhile, I've snipped some of what you wrote to focus on the issues
that I think are most relevant. I value and respect both your opinion
and your experience in these issues, but I have some rather profound
disagreements with your conclusions.
On 01/07/2011 21:48, Ade Lovett wrote:
On Jan 07, 2011, at 17:37 , Doug Barton wrote:
On 01/07/2011 13:54, Ade Lovett wrote:
Most likely it's low priority given all the other exp-runs that
affect 7.x/8.x, tweaking things for an 6.x-EOL-tagged tree, and
a bunch of other infrastructure stuff. Not to mention the
impending 7- and 8- RELEASEs.
Before I start on this, I would like a few things noted for the
record:
1. I have set Reply-To to developers@ (this should be a major hint)
2. I am not a current member of portmgr@ 3. I requested, and
served, for a very short time, on the first portmgr
That may very well be the case, but if so then it's incumbent on
portmgr to communicate that. If you check the audit trail you will
find that they did not.
Horsecrap. You are taking an individual PR history without reference
to the whole host of things that were also going on at the same time.
Like it or not, when it comes to ports, -STABLE wins over -CURRENT
every single time.
I disagree rather profoundly on this point. We have a
tolerance/expectation of our leadership just plain not communicating
with us that has gone way past unhealthy. It takes 30 seconds to respond
to a PR and say "We can't get to this before the pending releases, here
is a suggested course of action." That's a perfectly reasonable thing
for a person to expect in response to a request. In addition to not
responding just being plain rude, it fosters the attitude of "Why should
I bother communicating with portmgr, they never respond anyway."
Not to mention the fact that occasionally the fact that portmgr doesn't
like to communicate can sometimes create actual problems, such as when
they removed the MD5 checksum stuff without warning, and therefore broke
all the ports management and other tools that depended on them. I was
glad of the action to finish the change, but the action came after
months of no communication about it at all.
IMO this is a total red herring, and has been for several years
now. I run -current every day on my real-work system, and barring
the occasional hiccup it's been buildable nearly every time I've
tried.
Apologies for not being able to drive my email client appropriately.
The issue at hand is one of running -CURRENT.
There is a distinct, and fundamental difference between running
-CURRENT on a single system, as opposed to a cluster of systems that
are tightly interlinked.
Believe it or not, I understand that. I also get that sometimes running
package building on -current stresses it in ways that cause it to break.
That's a good thing. :)
My point is that YEARS of ignoring the problem is not acceptable, and
needs to change. For a long time portmgr griped about not having enough
systems for the build cluster. Now they have plenty of hardware
available, but the problem is that the system is too pointy-hat centric.
Apparently significant progress has been made in that area, but none of
it seems to have trickled down to actually getting more packages built
for more platforms better and faster.
I do, honestly, get that this is a hard problem. But if portmgr needs
help, it needs to ask for it. It asked for and received more hardware,
so clearly the foundation and the FreeBSD community at large is ready to
step up to help. I think it's pretty obvious at this point that the
gating factor is person-hours, so portmgr needs to be a lot more
aggressive in developing new volunteers, asking for help with specific
tasks, etc. etc. The fact that they are dealing with hard problems is no
longer an acceptable excuse for years of failure to solve them.
Sadly, the only thing I can say to your 4-step procedure, and with
utmost politeness, is that your src-centric views are completely
missing the point. "4. start building ports" is in fact a 20- or
30-step process to ensure no cross-contamination.
Once again, I get that bit too. Since we do, in fact, already have a
package building cluster I was handwaving it because I was trying to
address your red herring about "we can't find a version of -current we
like so we can't even try." The essential points that I'm trying to
communicate are:
1. Most of the time HEAD works pretty well nowadays
2. Very few ports care that deeply about the guts of the system they are
running on
I look forward to your input and total solutions on how to make this
better. I do.
See above. I would love it if the foundation wanted to fund me to spend
the amount of time it would take to actually step in and do the work,
but I myself cannot do it alone as a volunteer. That's even if portmgr
would accept my help which I find rather highly unlikely. My point is
not, "I know all the answers," my point is that the solution is not
going to come from continuing to ignore the problem; and if portmgr does
not currently have the people-bandwidth necessary to address it then it
ought to be reaching out to develop it.
Doug
--
Nothin' ever doesn't change, but nothin' changes much.
-- OK Go
Breadth of IT experience, and depth of knowledge in the DNS.
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