Florent Thoumie

For a long time, I’ve been ranting at portupgrade because:

• it’s slow (yeah)
  
• it’s ruby (no one except knu knows how this works)
  
• it’s buggy (see the number of open PRs in Gnats)
  
• it’s ruby (there’s no ruby in base)
  

So three days ago, I said it sucks that FreeBSD doesn’t have some tool in base to upgrade/install stuff properly and finally decided to write my own, in shell.

The project is doing quite well, I’ve something that almost works, but lacks some documentation and global cleanup. As with portupgrade, you can (per port/package) hold packages, specify some flags (WITH_FOO=yes WITHOUT_BAR=yes), set a preference for packages, ... One nice thing is that it works quite well with or without a ports tree (I tried today portinstall -PP xorg without a ports tree and it failed).

I hope to get a release soon, as some people seem interested to test it. Most important features are install/upgrade/remove. Installation and Upgrade are almost ok, but I haven’t looked into remove, but I don’t think it’ll be the worst part.

I’d like to have it in ports before 6.0-R is released but I’m not sure it’ll be ready at time. Future plans are integration in src tree (since it’s shell, it’s ok I guess).

I’m planning to work again on ndistool, since ndis framework changed a lot, it won’t work as well now. It might be a good idea to merge ndistool with ndisgen, but that would need adding my card list in the tree.

That’s all for today, I’ll go to bed soon after I wrote some other mdoc lines.