The future of portmaster [and of ports-mgmt/synth]

[Steve Kargl]

On Wed, May 31, 2017 at 07:28:38PM +0200, Per olof Ljungmark wrote:
> 
> On 2017-05-31 02:10, Kevin Oberman wrote:
> > On Tue, May 30, 2017 at 2:53 PM, Mark Linimon <linimon at lonesome.com 
> > <mailto:linimon at lonesome.com>> wrote:
> > 
> >     On Tue, May 30, 2017 at 11:46:46PM +0200, Per olof Ljungmark wrote:
> >     > Hello, I have not followed this thread before but just wanted to say
> >     > that I use portmaster extensively, it works for us and I would miss
> >     > it if it went.  Are there actually plans to retire it?
> > 
> >     To reiterate the status:
> > 
> >       * some extensive changes to the ports framework are coming;
> >       * these will require large changes to all the port upgrade tools;
> >       * no one has stepped forwards to offer to do the work for anything
> >         other than poudriere AFAIK.
> > 
> >     If no one does the work, at the time the large changes come, the
> >     other tools will break.
> > 
> >     People have been wanting subpackages (aka flavors) for many years;
> >     IIUC these are parts of the changes that are coming.
> > 
> >     Someone needs to step forwards and say "yes, I will do the work."
> > 
> >     mcl
> > 
> > Since portmaster is still popult and since the only solutions that looks 
> > to be available in the near term are pouderiere or raw make, neither 
> > terribly viable for many, I will look into updating portmaster to deal 
> > with 'flavors'. This looks fairly straight forward and I my have the sh 
> > capability to manage it. (And then again, I am far from a great shell 
> > person, so I may well be wrong.) I have looked at Doug's script and it 
> > is pretty readable, but writing may require help.
> > 
> > Can someone point me where to look for documentation on flavors? I have 
> > poked around the wiki, but to no avail. Unless there is documentation on 
> > what needs to be done, doing it will be hopeless and waiting for the 
> > packaging system to updated means portmaster WILL be broken for some 
> > period of time.
> 
> Let me just say that I would really, really appriciate if we could keep 
> such a simple tool. Why does it suit us? Because we have a limited 
> number of systems, and they are all different meaning that we custom 
> build for almost every task. Portmaster makes very easy to build what we 
> need on each host. Yes, it brakes sometimes but it is not that hard to 
> figure out how to get around.

+1

I have one i386 system (a laptop) with 1.5 GB of memory, at any
given time between 3-8 GB free diskspace, and a slow USB2 port.  
Poudriere and synth are simply overkill for maintaining ports 
for that laptop.

-- 
Steve
20170425 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWUpyCsUKR4
20161221 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbCHE-hONow