stable vs. unstable ports?

[Darren Weber]

I've been working with macports under the mis-apprehension that it would
operate along the lines of freeBSD (and some frustration may arise mostly
from that lack of understanding).  I decided that it's time for me to do
some long-overdue homework.  I've been working mostly with linux (and
developed a preference for Debian-Ubuntu), so I need to get educated about
BSD, as macports seems to follow that model (to some extent).  In case it's
of interest to others, I found a few interesting links online (I apologize
if similar macports docs are available, I must check into that also):

http://www.freebsd.org/
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/dev-model/book.html
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/releng/article.html
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/using-sysinstall.html
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/index.html
Handbook downloads in multiple formats:
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/

http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/CFBSD/

BSD jails (chroot)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroot
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/jails.html
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/virtualization.html

*NIX history
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/share/misc/bsd-family-tree?rev=1.115.2.3;content-type=text%2Fplain

freebsd vs openbsd (vs netbsd)
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies-archive.cfm/488714.html
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/bsd-17/important-read-this-before-posting-177142/
http://www.serverwatch.com/tutorials/article.php/10825_3393051_1

BSD vs Linux
http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/bsd4linux1.php

Bill Joy
I find it curious that Bill Joy created chroot to build BSD and then went on
to found Sun and probably contributed a lot to java design - perhaps the
whole idea of a chroot to build BSD might have been just the right
inspiration for the java vm and sdk.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Joy
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/09/11/bill_joys_greatest_gift/



On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 8:25 PM, Shreevatsa R
<shreevatsa.public at gmail.com>wrote:

> [Changing the topic from build systems and replying just to the
> original question]
>
> 2009/3/22 Darren Weber <dweber at macports.org>:
> >
> > I've noticed problems during port upgrades.
> >
> > What is the general consensus on having a TAG for each port to indicate
> it's
> > "success" status within the system?
>
> There is already a low-tech way of doing this: see if any bugs have
> been reported against the given port. :)
> Chances are that if others have had problems with upgrades, they would
> have (hopefully) filed a ticket against the port.
> Checking this is very easy to do thanks to Rainer Müller's recently
> implemented Trac report, e.g. use
> http://trac.macports.org/report/16?PORT=python25
> to see if there are any recent bugs with the python25 port that you care
> about.
>
> > Is it possible to have a meta-port monitor that automatically tracks the
> > status of each package install and reports that status back to a central
> > repository to continuously flag the status of a port install.  A simple
> > dichotomy of stable and unstable might suffice (Debian uses stable,
> > unstable, and testing).  Perhaps the monitoring system could provide the
> > data required to justify these port status levels.
>
> Note that what Debian does is something quite a bit more: they have
> entirely different *sets* of ports marked stable, testing, unstable
> and users choose to install all their packages from the same set
> ("tree"). This is fine for Debian to do because they have enough
> people, but it would not be a good idea for MacPorts: having to
> maintain multiple sets of inter-compatible ports leads to too much
> fragmentation and the situation might end up similar to that with
> Fink: the stable ports work very well but are too outdated for most
> purposes, the unstable ports are really unstable and *still* quite a
> bit older than in MacPorts. Having only one current version of each
> port, which everyone gets and reports bugs against etc. is one of
> MacPorts's strengths.
>
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