Re: broken ports

[Ian Main <imain_(_at_)_netidea_(_dot_)_com>]

On Wed, Oct 20, 1999 at 11:54:33AM +1000, Ian McWilliam wrote:
> 
> 
> What really needs to happen and soon is discussion on formulating better
> more rigid polocies for the direction of ports and packages. At the moment
> the direction people perceve as to where it should be going is diversely
> different.
> 
> There's nothing wrong with having source and there's nothing wrong with
> having binaries either. Each have thier own pitfalls. We need polocies that
> allow both to exist, especially around release time. This may also mean
> that the parts of the source tree may need to freeze a little earlier so
> major things don't change and there is enough time to devote to building
> packages. I don't know the full answer, but maybe some constructive
> discussion may help.

The more I think about it, I really liked the previous suggestion of having
the port _always_ build a package and then installing that package.  This
forces the port to be correct at least in the respect of building a package
with all the files in the right place etc.

To throw some more fuel on the fire, I wrote a perl script which checks
distsites.  It's still rough, and not too bright (you will see some bogus
output), but I ran it and have put the results up at
http://www.netidea.com/imain/distfiles-test.txt. A little grep magic makes
it much more useful, but I'll leave that up to you folks :)

If anyone is interested in the script lemme know.. I'll do some more work on
it in a bit, but I wasn't in too big a hurry as ports are frozen.

Ian