On Thu 31 Mar 2011 at 22:57:44 PDT Matthew D. Fuller wrote:
So, while removing OPTIONS alone may be good, we really need to dismantle the system that caused the need for them in the first place to avoid creating a greater mess. I think it coud be useful to turn to Wikipedia for an example (and indeed, not just an example, but a pre-built distribution system!). By simply eliminating any sort of officially "blessed" ports tree (with all the complications and liabilities that entails), encouraging users to set up Wikipedia pages with recipes for building packages, and building a little infrastructure (using sufficient tools already existing in the base system; we can easily backport to 6.x and beyond) for fetching them down and building on request, we can free up an enormous amount of machine- and man-power, while making the result far more democratic. Really, the only significant challenge is rogue vandalism, but again, Wikipedia itself has already developed systems for handling that. It may take a little effort on our part to keep that up for our particular needs, but surely far less than is currently required. And as an additional bonus, by having it available on an easily-editable wiki, we can save all the trouble of submitting and load of dealing with PR's, and reduce our dependance on gnats too. It's pretty much all upside, when you think about it.
Or we could simply stop fighting the common misconception that there's such a thing as a BSD distro. Instead, we should embrace the concept and encourage people to combine the kernel and userland with their own preferred set of packages, built with their preferred set of options and configurations, and to make the result available somewhere for download -- preferably on a site they host themselves. PC-BSD has already made the first steps in this direction. No one understands the distinction we're making between OS'es and distros anyway. The prevailing opinion seems to be that the quality of an OS can be gauged, for example, by whether or not it has a graphical installer, whether it uses KDE or Gnome, and whether or not it can run Flash. :) _______________________________________________ freebsd-ports@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-ports-unsubscr...@freebsd.org"
