Florent Thoumie

I’m always happy to read feedback about my (limited, I admit) work on FreeBSD. This X.org work has been running for quite some time and is my most significant contribution to ports.

I don’t like being rude to people and I think most of the people I’ve been working with on FreeBSD can confirm I’m a quite cool and helpful guy, open-minded about other systems. While FreeBSD has been my OS of choice for the past 7 years, I’ve never been a zealot, I’ve often recommended some GNU/Linux distributions rather than FreeBSD, just because when you come from Windows, Ubuntu (for example) is just easier to get installed and running.

Anyway, I came across a blog entry today and while I can understand that people may be wrong about some FreeBSD stuff, I’m not expecting those people to make strong (and completely wrong) statements either. Funny thing is that the blog is called “Opensource and Strong opinions”. Let’s rename this “Utter Bullshit and Strong opinions”.

So here’s my answer:

Ok, so two things that might be of interest to you:

• FreeBSD source is branched, FreeBSD ports are not. What does that mean? Well, changes committed in the source tree go to HEAD (or CURRENT) first, except very rare occasions like security advisories or commits related to code having been removed from HEAD. With this commit may be associated a MFC (Merge From Current) delay, if the committer plans on merging the change to STABLE branches (right now, the supported ones are RELENG_6 and RELENG_5). Once that delay has passed and the committer thinks the code has received sufficient testing and/or review, the code is merged to RELENG_* branches of his choice. This doesn’t exist with ports because there are no branches (well only one, which is mainstream). Ports are not associated to any source branch, then saying that “X.org 7.2 never went into 7-CURRENT” is an absolute non-sense.
• Reading manual pages doesn’t hurt. I hate portupgrade, but right now, it’s one of those tools you simply can’t avoid using when dealing with large numbers of ports. People will argue that portmaster is getting better and better but IMHO, it’s not ready for prime time (Doug Barton is working on it on a regular basis, so this might happen soon-ish). So if you want to replace a port with another, you’ll be happy to now that there is such an option (-o). Admittedly, the description can be a bit meaningless to the neophyte, but there’s a really good EXAMPLES section at the end (and it’s worth reading, I can’t stress that enough).

I’m not going to take your points one by one and explain you what to do, because I think I wasted already a lot of time on this blog entry.

If there’s only one thing you should remember about my post, let it be that bashing is authorized, but please get a clue first. Otherwise you’re just making an ass of yourself.

Rant over.

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