Re: To be a new DFly commiter

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Mar 17, 2007 at 03:30:11PM +0100, Michel Talon wrote:
> Another excellent statement! Maintaining a decent ports system is a task for
> hundred people. FreeBSD has aroud 200 people doing that, Debian, around
> 1000.

To be fair, Debian *needs* the thousand people because the approach to
packagement they use doesn't scale.

> One has to be totally unaware of realities to suggest tools from
> obscure Linux distributions, wether they are good or bad, when such
> distribution may collapse at any moment. 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.

Package counting like comparing penis length. There are more important
parameters... I've spoken with at least one member of FreeBSD's portmgr
who cursed the current size of the tree, making it very hard to
maintain or move forward. A friend also just reminded me that ports has
over 8700 (!) Perl modules in the list, factoring that out reducing the
divisor a lot.

You don't know the advance? Check out a pkgsrc tree and try building
random stuff on DragonFly and do the same with ports. Any other question
needed? As the person responsible for 2/3 of that I decided to use the
way of least resistence and the way more appealing for technical
reasons.

> The NetBSD people have replaced the horrible mess which is the 4000 lines 
> bsd.port.mk by a similar horrible mess except it is scattered over many
> 5 lines files.

You have to start somewhere. Moving logic out of the make scripts is an
on-going task, which is work if you don't want to break something. Or
want to keep the breakage down to strange packages doing bad things.

> 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. 

I simply refuse to comment that, but it is somewhat ironic...

Joerg