Drop of portindex

[Garance A Drosihn]

>  > At 11:21 AM 9.15.2004 -0400, Adam Weinberger wrote:
>  > >
>>  >Let it be, people, and stop attacking other developers.
>  > >
>  > ># Adam

I agree.

Someone else wrote:
>  > Obviously, we all won't agree, but I think you should be more
>  > concerned about the damages this did to the ports' credibility.
>  > Up until now, I have always "trusted" the ports -- some of that
>  > has diminished because of this episode.

I think this one example (out of 10,000 ports) just has a few
unfortunate things related to it.  One problem is the bug in bdb
(in the base system) that many users suddenly hit while using
portupgrade.  The second problem was a few people reacted to
this by promoting portindex as the solution, simply because they
liked the port.

Why was that a problem?  Because it suddenly made portindex look
like it was an *official* part of the Ports collection.  Not just
some random program which was inside the ports collection, but a
program that everyone should use *for* installing ports.  This
brought a flood of new users, and that apparently triggered some
problems for the developer.

We can not police the licenses of every port in a collection of
10,000 (and growing!) ports, but I do think we should be more
careful when it comes to promoting packages to all users of the
ports collection.

Unfortunately, the "we" in that last paragraph includes a lot of
people, including many people who are not the official developers
of "the ports collection".  Perhaps this means that the ports
collection will need to police the licenses of anything which
claims to operate on the ports collection, just to avoid this
confusion.  I do not know what the best solution would be.

Disclaimer: Note that I am *not* a ports-developer.  But I am sure
the people who do work on the ports-collection are trying to decide
what (if anything) needs to be done about this.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu