Hello, I'm curious if there is any major work being done in developing the ports infrastructure right now or if it is mostly just minor features or bug fixes that are being added. The main reason I'm asking is that there are several major improvements, IMHO, that gentoo's portage has over the bsds' ports system that I would like to see included. The biggest thing is the USE flags. One of the biggest annoyances I have with major upgrades using portupgrade is when I leave it upgrading for a day and come home to find it sitting at the mplayer-skins screen asking what skins I want to install and that it spent less then an hour doing any work upgrading. I really don't care much about skins, the default is fine, but instead is wasted nearly a whole day when I wasn't using the system. Not to mention, I installed this port before and selected all since I have plenty of hard drive space, why couldn't it at least remember my last configuration if not default to something. USE flags would also eliminate the need for ports like exim-ldap.
Another improvement of portage is that any port can hold multiple ebuilds, instead of a single makefile so both mozilla and mozilla-devel would be in the same directory as two different ebuilds. In fact, I think gentoo has at least 5 of the latest ebuilds in the mozilla directory. This makes it easier to choice an older version if the latest has some bugs not worked out yet. Yesterday I just ran across portaudit and tried it out. I found that the mozilla-devel build I have has some security vulnerabilities in it, which is understandable for a -devel version. I used -devel a few months back when the mozilla port was too old for my purposes, but no longer the case. So then I tried to build mozilla instead only to find it had it's own security vulnerabilities. I tried updating the ports tree, but both ports still had problems. At least on gentoo I would of had five choices. Also, any specific ebuild can be marked as unsupported/unusable, experimental, or stable for a particular architecture; I think mozilla has two experimental, and three or more stable ebuilds. The last feature I would like to see in ports is the ability to hold back certain ports or force them to always use packages. lang/ezm3 and editors/openoffice-1.1 almost always fail compiling at some point with cc1 being killed for eating too much memory. I prefer to always build from ports even when the latest package exists minus these two ports. Also, I might just prefer to keep kde where it is since it takes so long to build and sometimes they update the port several times in a short period of time. I might be able to volunteer some time to this as, at least the first thing I mentioned I think could really use some work. -- I sense much NT in you. NT leads to Bluescreen. Bluescreen leads to downtime. Downtime leads to suffering. NT is the path to the darkside. Powerful Unix is. Public Key: ftp://ftp.tallye.com/pub/lorenl_pubkey.asc Fingerprint: B3B9 D669 69C9 09EC 1BCD 835A FAF3 7A46 E4A3 280C
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