The poor thing mentioned (again) being driven away from the FreeBSD Project because of two developers who shall remain nameless (one of them being myself), who dared calling him an idiot. Well, I will repeat myself: clueless and whining person == idiot.

Should you not have been an idiot, you would have admitted that your understanding of how ports and packages work was wrong and you would have just said that it was simply not a good match for your needs. There’s plenty of choice, shop around, as you’re already doing.

Apart from that, there are loads of people using patched releases (via freebsd-update(1), which you also criticized, for various utterly wrong reasons, as pointed out by Colin Percival, the maintainer of the tool) with what I’ll call stable packages (which is actually latest packages built on FreeBSD-STABLE, as opposed to current packages which are built against FreeBSD-CURRENT).

After I accepted a hat from portmgr, I started looking at pkg_install again. I’ve already done some cleaning which I mentioned previously but it now seems like i have a new part-time job.

I’m working on a config file support right now. I’ve done some more cleaning up (removing FreeBSD 5.x support, fixing pkg_info ftp://...). I’ll have a look at PRs later.

Code is living at http://git.xbsd.org/projects/pkg-install/. To check it out:

$ git clone git://git.xbsd.org/projects/pkg-install.git
$ cd pkg-install
$ git fetch origin cleanup:cleanup (if you want the cleanup branch)
$ git fetch origin config:config (if you want the config branch)

If you’re reading Planet FreeBSD, you already know that I’ve been offered to join portmgr@ a few days ago. Since then I’ve done some cleanup in pkg_install related stuff: removed pkg_sign, sync’ed RELENG_7 and RELENG_6 with HEAD, removed old pkg_install-devel port, updated pkg_install port, added a distfile target to pkg_install in src/ to generate a new distfile for use with ports/, ...).

I was also browsing pkg_install code to look for ancient/unsupported/broken code. I’ve found that “@option extract-in-place” wasn’t used anywhere under ports/. If you’re too lazy to read pkg_create(1), basically it extracts the contents of a package straight into $PREFIX rather than to a staging area first. Pav ran an exp-build to see if defaulting to in-place extraction breaks anything and, obviously, it did. Thankfully I could reproduce quickly and I’ll investigate in the next few hours. I expect to find loads of gems like this one.

Go there for more info: http://wiki.freebsd.org/Ports/X11/Todo

PS: If you’re still linking to planet.xbsd.org, please change it to planet.freebsdish.org.

WordPress-MU and Planet were unavailable for a short as I replaced Apache with Lighttpd. I think everything is back on, drop me an email if something is misbehaving.

Most noticeable is that people can now leave comments using their OpenID. I’ve also replaced SpamKarma with Bad-Behavior and added a bunch of plugins that people can activate themselves. Have fun!

I think I’ve fixed most outstanding issues with x11 ports (mga driver, xdm, ...) in the past few days. If you have a major issue like Xorg crashing at startup, I recommend reading the x11@ archives and if you still don’t find any solution, then contact the Xorg developers and/or open a bug report at bugs.freedesktop.org.

Source: FreshPorts