Can't build ports on older FreeBSD machine

[Brett Glass]

At 10:33 PM 4/18/2005, Kris Kennaway wrote:

>OK, but I don't care about your HO on this matter.

You may not, but users of FreeBSD do. At the very least,
ports should be tagged as to the versions of the OS
with which they will work, and it should be possible
to retrieve the most recent version of the port that
works with the version of the OS you are running.
Having users update in the standard (and prescribed)
way and finding out that a major function (the entire
ports system) is no longer working is certainly not
something one would expect from professionally crafted
software.

Note that under Linux, the maintainers of distributions
do exactly this. However, FreeBSD is essentially its own
"distro," so the job of doing this falls to the FreeBSD
developers and the maintainers of the ports. If it is
not done, FreeBSD users will enjoy an inferior experience
to the one they get with Linux or even Windows.

--Brett Glass