On 10/04/2011 05:38 PM, Marc Espie wrote:
On Tue, Oct 04, 2011 at 04:43:12PM -0400, David Cantrell wrote:
You don't and you don't care about that. I'm talking about
extending the infrastructure to support more fetch mechanisms. If
people are building from source anyway, especially locally managed
ports, if it breaks, they get to keep the pieces. You can't audit
things you don't ship, so why care?
My suggestion was to add support to the ports system infrastructure
to allow people an easy way to locally package up stuff from
projects that do not release tarballs. I'm not advocating
eliminating checksums on everything, nor am I advocating accepting
ports in to the main ports tree that work this way, nor am I
advocating destruction of any existing tried and true methods. I'm
just pointing out that the infrastructure as it exists could do with
a handful of other fetching mechanisms to make life easier for
people making local ports. Ports they have no interest in
submitting to the main ports tree.
Two points:
- if stuff such as this is visible from the main tree, some idiots will
think they are actually there to be used, and we will have to say no again
and again.
I would say that's perfect for a port submission review process. The
ports infrastructure could certainly contain more functionality than
would be allowable in official ports.
- stuff such as this won't be used by us, won't work with mirroring tools,
and will break sooner or later. Contrarily to what you may think, this is
not free. This will require some maintenance. If anything, just to properly
ignore the corresponding lines of code. If we keep that feature around, it
means some other (actually desireable) feature won't see all that much love.
I'm pretty well aware of the costs associated with software development.
At any rate, I seem to have hit a thorn. I've viewed the ports
infrastructure (the collection of Makefiles and Perl modules) as tools
that not only implement the official ports system, but as tools that
local administrators can use to package up and maintain very esoteric
things. If that's not a goal of the ports infrastructure, it's not a
goal and that's fine with me. I will find another way.
--
David Cantrell <david.l.cantr...@gmail.com>
WH6DSN | http://blog.burdell.org/
