Panther tickets

Bradley Giesbrecht brad at pixilla.com
Thu May 21 19:18:36 PDT 2009


On May 21, 2009, at 11:39 AM, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote:

>
> On May 21, 2009, at 7:39 AM, David Osguthorpe wrote:
>
>> I really get concerned when I see statements like this - so much  
>> that I start
>> thinking maybe forking macports to eg. linuxports is needed - or  
>> maybe back
>> to darwinports
>
> Which would gain you ... ?
>
> We've had this debate before, and it always seems to boil down to  
> "Hey, let's rip the non-MacOSX stuff out.  We're MacPorts, not  
> *Ports!"  "No no, I had some Linux support working last year, even  
> though it hasn't been maintained at all and only 10 ports actually  
> work with it!" and then everyone tries to placate the person who put  
> in that well-intentioned, but ultimately doomed (to rot) support by  
> simply dropping the subject until the next time it comes up.
>
> The fact remains pretty clear that the Linux folks and all the *BSDs  
> have their own systems for managing software, and no more than a  
> tiny fraction of their user base will ever use ours (the Gentoo BSD  
> folks come to mind as another good example of that principle in  
> action).  Without users in any quantity, there is very little  
> attention actually paid to the code in question and without  
> attention, it becomes little more than the personal hobby of the few  
> people who actually use that Linux/BSD/Solaris support code and  
> MacPorts becomes an amalgam of common-good code and personal, pet  
> projects.  Not my idea of a good time.

For the record this is what would concern me:
>> Why should you care that some people use powerpc architectures

I have expense high end work stations and servers that are powerpc.  
They should last a long long time.

I would hope that we wouldn't drop powerpc support unless it was  
seriously holding the user base back.

//Brad


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