Re: FBSD4.10+firefox: missing shared object

From: John Eggert (finarfinjge_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 01/20/05 

Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2005 19:55:32 -0500

Kris Kennaway wrote:

> On 2005-01-19, Michel Talon <talon@lpthe.jussieu.fr> wrote:
>
>> when portupgrade will *really* work, and this means as a
>> prerequisite no broken ports, no ports unbuildable under such and
>> such revision of FreeBSD, etc. etc. then it will be advisable to
>> not fiddle with the system, and use exclusively portupgrade. At
>> present, there are far too many shaky ports requiring manual
>> adjustement to get them to compile and portupgrade has a very
>> limited usefulness. It may work for someone who has installed a
>> basic KDE system with not much more. After a couple of weeks on my
>> 5.3 fresh new box i have installed around 600 ports, and i needed
>> to tweak things for around 50 ports. In such a case portupgrade is
>> a joke.
>
> I keep hearing this level of complaint from people, but it's too
> vague to be useful.
>
> Kris

Hi Kris:

Here are some concrete examples:

Recently, it has been necessary to make changes to libraries
associated with threading. As such, there are now a number of
machines with revised .conf files. This may lead to complications
later or just cruft. If one compiles a port with any flags set, then
I assume one either needs to keep track of all such things or put
them into make.conf (does that work?). In either case, the flags may
change etc. My most recent portupgrade required 3 days to complete.
Most of the failures were documented somewhere and I was able to get
most things working (printing is still deathly slow though). It was
an iterative process though and very time consuming. This has been
the case with most of my port upgrades. Anywhere from 4 hours to 4
days tracking down issues in UPGRADING, Makefiles, newsgroups and my
personal pet peeve, bloody mailing lists.

I think Michel's point is valid. For someone using the operating
system to do work, it is very expensive to spend time tweaking rather
than billing hours. To be fair, this criticism is valid for every OS
I've used, with the possible exception of QNX.

Cheers.

JE 

-- 
The opinions expressed are mine alone. My employer would crap if it
were known what I write here.

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