Re: Stable tag will be slipped Sunday and release engineering will begin Monday

[walt <wa1ter@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 5 Apr 2005, Bill Hacker wrote:

> But the Lotus-Seven roadster, OTOH, I built from a kit,
> so I guess that my only 'natural' child here...

I suppose I'm laughing because I've already chugged my fair share of
beer today.

I want to inject one more comment about packaging systems and then I'll
shut up:

The most important ingredient in any packaging system is the *labor* provided
by the developers who choose, for whatever reason, to do the hard work on our
behalf.

Joe Marcus Clarke has been doing an incredibly competent job of keeping the
FreeBSD port developers honest for several years now.  I can't imagine that
he will want to continue that thankless job for much longer -- but I hope
I'm wrong.

As a long-time NetBSD follower I can see how much labor has gone into the
pkgsrc system (in parallel with the FreeBSD ports system).  It does seem
a shame for so many talented people to spend so much work on parallel
efforts when they might instead be combining their efforts.

Pkgsrc (as I understand it) was intended to be an all-purpose, cross-platform
solution to porting third-party applications.  The problem of compiling and
installing such applications seems to be pretty well solved, AFAICT.

The task of *upgrading* a collection of such ports has lagged behind in pkgsrc,
at least as implemented in NetBSD-current.

Nothing I've said here is intended to disparage or discourage the people
who are continuing to improve on pkgsrc.  They have already done more than
I could ever do, and they will continue to do more great things.

My only point is that pkgsrc is not *quite* ready for prime-time.....yet.