[HEADSUP] pkg(8) is now the only package management tool

[Tom Evans]

On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 3:21 PM, Michelle Sullivan <michelle at sorbs.net> wrote:
> Tom Evans wrote:
>> On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 3:05 PM, Michelle Sullivan <michelle at sorbs.net> wrote:
>>
>>> I think portsnap should provide 'stable' - tested, known
>>> working, security patched...
>>>
>>
>> 100%, and as soon as someone comes along who is prepared to do and pay
>> for that, I think we would all enjoy it.
>>
>> Unfortunately, someone like that doesn't yet exist, so it is
>> unrealistic to just expect that infrastructure to be there.
>>
>
> Well as I was one of the people trying to raise funds for FreeBSD (for
> general stuff, not specifically this) and as $employer will *not* be
> adopting FreeBSD now the chances of having such just reduced.
>

That's a fallacious argument; "if *someone* doesn't put the
infrastructure in to place then *we* can't contribute more".

This is what Linux distributions spend their money on; employing
people to do infrastructure engineering. When a new release of httpd
happens, people at Red Hat manually back-merge fixes to the version of
httpd that is in their package repository.

FreeBSD has volunteers who maintain the ports tree, they have no time
to manually merge and test fixes, so when a new release of httpd
happens in FreeBSD, the version changes and you get all the new
features and bug fixes.

So if you use FreeBSD, that infrastructure is not there; you need to
do it in house. How tricky that is depends on the size of your house -
Netflix have no problems, Yahoo have no problems, SMEs like the one I
work for - problems.

I'm not denying the problem; just that specifying what should or
shouldn't happen with the ports tree is not productive if you aren't
proposing to actually do it yourself.

Cheers

Tom