On Sat, 3 Dec 2011, Doug Barton wrote:
On 12/3/2011 5:03 AM, sth...@nethelp.no wrote:
The fact that we have so many people who are radically
change-averse, no matter how rational the change; is a bug, not a
feature.
This particular bug is complicated dramatically by the fact that
the majority view seems to lean heavily towards "If I use it, it
must be the default and/or in the base" rather than seeing ports
as part of the overall operating SYSTEM.
I don't think of myself as change-averse. I've been using FreeBSD
since 1996, and there have been lots of changes since that time. But
two of the most important reasons I still use FreeBSD are:
- Stability: Both in the sense of "stays up basically forever", and
in the sense of "changes to interfaces and commands are carefully
thought through and not applied indiscriminately". For instance, I
like very much the fact that the ifconfig command can configure VLANs
etc - while Linux has introduced new commands to do this.
Agreed.
- The base system is a *system* and comes with most of what I need,
for instance tcpdump and BIND. For me the fact that I don't need to
install lots of packages to have a usable system is a *good* thing.
So 2 things here that I really wish people would think about.
1. If you're using *any* ports/packages then you're already
participating in the larger operating *system* that I described, so
installing a few more won't hurt. (Seriously, it won't.)
2. In (the very few) areas where integration of 3rd party apps into the
base makes sense, no problem. But at this point the fact that a lot of
3rd party stuff is changing more rapidly than it used to, and often in
incompatible ways and/or at incompatible schedules with our release
process, means that we have to re-think how we do this.
You mentioned BIND, which is a great example of 2. above. I'll have more
to say about this soon, but my plan is to remove it from the base for
10.x because the current situation is unmanageable.
In my mind, your "2. above" is an example to keep BIND in
the base. When I build FreeBSD from sources, I know that
everything in src/ works together. I can update my system
and be reasonably assured of that. However, updating ports
is not at all like that. There is much more work involved
in updating ports - you really need an extra test box to make
sure that everything works together before updating the
deployed system. One might argue that you need an
extra test box even for updating src/ only, but in my
experience it's not been nearly as necessary as updating
ports.
We don't have @ports resources for it, but in a perfect
world there would be a ports branch for each supported
FreeBSD branch. I would like security updates and bug
fixes for ports, but not latest and greatest stuff.
I like BIND in base (I won't argue against removing it,
just stating my preference), and I would also like to see
LDAP (at least client) in base. IMHO, FreeBSD base should
include everything necessary to work in a networked
environment.
--
DE
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