[geeks] What is going on with the open source community ...the stupid bastards are clueless

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Mon, 28 Apr 2008, Michael C. Vergallen wrote:

> They should be carefull not to do this when the original package does
> not allow this their is a good reason for it. The reason in this case
> is ~ obvious it just does not work on other platfoms besides NetBSD..
> The problem with the FreeBSD ports tree is that when I last looked at
> it it didn4t have support for Solaris...has that changed yet ?

OpenBSD's and FreeBSD's ports trees are only supported on their
respective operating systems.  That's the entire point: they're
collections of applications that have been ported to that platform.
NetBSD's pkgsrc used to be that, but it looks like they've taken on a
near-impossible task of porting an arbitrary number of programs to an
arbitrary number of platforms using a single infrastructure.

The reason the ports trees on OpenBSD and FreeBSD work so well is how
closely they're tied to the local environment.  This lets them exploit
nonportable features of make, for example.  I have tremendous respect
for the task the pkgsrc team have undertaken, but I think it's mostly an
exercise in frustration.

That said, I don't know why pkgsrc would want to create one overarching
system for building packages on any platform, as opposed to building a
more generic framework with platform-specific modules to make the best
use of the local toolset.  With an architecture like that, pkgsrc's
"home" platform (NetBSD) would be an equivalent case to some other
platform, and neither harder nor easier to maintain.  This would allow a
large portion of the per-package metadata to be used on any supported
platform, without having to redo the entire build system everywhere to
deal with a few problem children.

On Solaris, I've always just built my own packages (and, since at least
2002 or so, with Sun's compiler).  Most are no trouble at all.  Some
are, ahem, "opportunities for growth."  Lacking the time to do that,
I've used precompiled packages, which seem to mostly work well.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke | "There is more to life than increasing its speed."
Elgin, TX         |                                   --Mahatma Gandhi
USA               |