Re: To be a new DFly commiter

["Steve O'Hara-Smith" <steve@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 17 Mar 2007 15:30:11 +0100
Michel Talon <talon@lpthe.jussieu.fr> wrote:

> Already the move  to NetBSD pkgsrc
> has cost DFLY division by 3 of the number of available ports with respect
> to FreeBSD for an advantage that i have hard time to even discern.

	The advantage is simple to see, as DragonFly and FreeBSD diverged
more and more of the FreeBSD ports were failing to build, by now with the
termination of FreeBSD-4.x support in the ports tree I suspect there would
be a large number of ports failing. The dfports override mechanism was a
pure hack that would not have been maintainable for long without
effectively forking the FreeBSD ports. As you observed in the bit I snipped
maintaining a ports system is no job for a small team so avoiding doing
that by joining in with a cross platform system was definitely a good move
IMHO.

> Like in many cases it is OpenBSD which is doing the good
> work, and in particular they have understood the obvious, that is a ports
> system must be centered about binary packages, not recompiling source. 
> This is true for at least two reasons:
> - first, today users don't want to lose time compiling

	Even if 99.99999999% of all users were to use only binary packages
*someone* would have to compile sources and maintain patches. For this
purpose pkgsrc seems to be well suited.

	Binary packages from pkgsrc are readily available for most if not
all platforms supported by pkgsrc, and yet many pkgsrc users recompile from
source, which seems to contradict your contention. To my mind a system that
provides binary packages for those that want them and allows source
building for those that want to is ideal, certainly a system that provided
only binary packages would not please me.

	When we factor in the little detail that many packages have build
options and if you don't like the ones chosen for the bulk builds (for
example I use sane but I don't want the gimp around) you have to compile
your own it becomes clear that there is at least one good reason for doing
your own compiles.

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