Re: It's not Rust, it's FreeBSD (and LLVM)

On 2024-09-08, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@phk.freebsd.dk> wrote:

>> > The source tree became our citadel: "FreeBSD is src".  If something
>> > was not in src, it was not FreeBSD.
>>
>> We are way past that too, FreeBSD is src+ports+docs(+community).
>
> Nope.
>
> The only reason the Rust advocates need to bring this up is /precisely/
> because that is not the case.
>
> If it were, they would just have added ports.
>
>> In your world. And in the world of some other people. But there are a 
>> lot of worlds where this is not true. I have systems which are updated 
>> from src, and use only packages which are build locally.
>
> Beware of selection bias.
>
> "Somebody who compiles from src" is almost the literal definition of "committer".


WHAT ARE YOU SMOKING ???

AFAIK everybody who needs patches is oblidged to recompile from
source. And I don't get kerberos to work without my patches, I dont
get netgraph to work without my patches, I don't get ipfw to work
without my patches.
And AFAIK committers are people who write NEW software. I am not
interested in that, I only need to make the existing software
actually work as intended for my site. 

The practical idea behind "FreeBSD is src" is NOT that everything
must necessarily be below /usr/src, it is that everything can be
patched rightaway. This is about maintainability.

Because, if we don't have that, then there is no reason to not use
Linux (where you may find something in /usr/src, but most likely not
the actual code that was compiled and is currently running the
system).
And so, if we don't have that, then we have the same situation as
everybody else: sitting on a huge pile of unintellegible software
where nobody knows why it does[n't] work, and there is no way to
find out with affordable effort.

Back in 1995 it was commonsense to build from source.
Nowadays it seems, the world is split into producers and consumers,
and the consumers are supposed to only click buttons and watch
progress bars and not have an idea about what they are actually doing.
This goes in-line with forced digitization, but that way I would
not get to an appropriately working system.

> In terms of all the FreeBSD running hardware out there, not even
> one percent of one percent of the machines compile from src.

Well, I might assume anybody who seriousely runs Berkeley, do have
their own deploy chain and build servers.