Re: Why Are You NOT Using FreeBSD?

Hi,

On 06 June 2012 15:15:24 Chris Rees wrote:
> On 6 June 2012 14:48, Erich Dollansky <erich_at_alogreentechnologies.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > On 06 June 2012 9:21:22 Sean Cavanaugh wrote:
> >>
> >> Overall I see it as packages are flat stable at the cost of being out of
> >> date, and ports are current but not guaranteed to compile without
> >> intervention. The Maintainers do give a very good shot to make them stable
> >> but sometimes one person cannot maintain millions of lines of code and not
> >> make a glitch occasionally, or make it out on time when a dependency
> >> changes.
> >
> > isn't the date of the packages the date of the last release of the branch? Aren't the chances high then to get a working ports tree?
> >
> > You can follow the discussion about this subject for at least 10 years back. The result is always the same.
> >
> > In parallel is the discussion why so little people are using FreeBSD.
> >
> > Do you understand what I want to say?
> 
> I do understand it, but you don't seem to understand that we *do*
> understand what you're saying.
> 
> - Tagged ports trees contain out of date software.
> 
that is the idea.

> - Security fixes cannot be backported to tagged trees- we *do* *not*
> *have* *resources* for this.

It should not be done.

When I manually fall back to the last release ports tree I can get, I have the same result.

When I use packages, the result is either identical but at least it can be assumed that the packages are not the latest versions.

After going back, I get a running system again. I then wait until the ports tree seems to be ok again. I do then the upgrade.

I exchange a running system against a broken system. The running system might has some security issues, the broken system migh works 99.99999% but the little thing I would like to have is not there for me at the moment.

So, I understand your reasoning. I also understand the problems beginners have. At least this are the problems I have heard from the few people I could convince to check FreeBSD out. If I remember right, none has had any complaints about FreeBSD itself. All problems have been linked to the ports tree.  It turned out very often that they did not differ between the ports tree and the operating system.

I do not ask for myself. I have found my solution for this. As a consequence out this, I am precisely in the situation you described. The machine is out of date. The machine might has security problems but the machine does what I want to do.

And, after some time of compiling and upgrading and waiting the machine is current again.

I wonder now. Is my solution really so awkward?

Erich