[nycbug-talk] Request for Review, Summary of FreeBSD src fetching problems

[Brett Wynkoop]

On Thu, 14 Feb 2013 18:28:20 -0500
Marc Spitzer <mspitzer at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 14, 2013 at 3:26 PM, Brian Callahan <bcallah at devio.us>
> wrote:

SNIP SNIP
> 
> How is source access not easy?  just install svn and you have it.  Is
> there a hard step I am missing?

Let's start with....maybe you do not have /usr/ports or
want /usr/ports.  It is not a good practice to force the user to
install ports to be able to update base.  I had the same complaint with
cvs years ago because you had to install ports to get either full  cvs
or cvsup before you could update base.  cvs and cvsup were also both
largish compared to just base, especially when ports gets tossed in
just to get it. 

This issue was solved with the introduction of csup in base.  

> 

> again install svn and done, ie cd /usr/ports/devel/subversion && make
> && make install is the hard way.  To be honest I have small hope of
> anyone becoming a developer if svn is a show stopper.

I will buy you a clue here:


wynkoop at beaglebone:~ % uname -a
FreeBSD beaglebone 10.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 10.0-CURRENT #3: Mon Feb 11 18:24:59 EST 2013     root at beaglebone:/sys/arm/compile/BEAGLEBONE-DEBUG  arm

wynkoop at beaglebone:~ % df -h
Filesystem        Size    Used   Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/mmcsd0s2a    7.2G    3.4G    3.2G    51%    /
devfs             1.0k    1.0k      0B   100%    /dev
devfs             1.0k    1.0k      0B   100%    /var/named/dev
wynkoop at beaglebone:~ % 


I want to take up a huge bunch of space on my disk so I can do updates
to base?  I do not think so.

> 
> 
> 
> >
> > If even one person (/business/manufacturer/**whatever) skips out on
> > fbsd because of this svn debacle, it should be considered a massive
> > failure in the eyes of the project and the devs, because who knows
> > - that one person could have gone on to become the next core team
> > member.
> >

He is right.  There is no telling what lost opportunities and talent
will come from the core developers not thinking of the outer layers of
the community as broadly as they should.

> 
> one person is not a failure, let alone a debacle.  I think freebsd
> made the right decision for freebsd from the available choices as I
> understand it. the community of freebsd devs made the decision for
> valid reasons as believed by the people who get to decide and some
> people are not happy about it and blowing it out of proportion, well
> ok life goes on.

No one is arguing that svn is the wrong tool for full developer
access.  The point is that for non-core developers that need source for
updates it should not require almost as much disk space as the core of
the OS and it should not require the installation of anything NOT
INCLUDED IN BASE!  It should also be easy to use.


> to be honest I think that the binary updates are vastly superior to
> source updates, I get check sums, reinstall/clone is faster and when
> build tools show up in my web server I just may have a problem.
> 
> marc

So marc are you saying you are going to start doing daily builds of head
for ARM including each different board?  In the ARM world there is no
such thing as a GENERIC kernel that will run on all arm boards.  The Pi
can not boot the Bone kernel and it is more complex than just making
sure the kernel is driver overloaded!

How do I access the binary updates you are building for ARM?

-Brett


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