Thu, 19 Apr 2007

12:33 AM - (no subject)

ctriv committed fixes for the qt33 port, and opera.  He's also working on GNUstep.  gnustep-base and a few other gnustep ports are now working.  If GNUstep is already installed, some GNUstep ports are working.  Many still have make package related errors. 

Ports relying on binary packages seem to die on make fake or make package.  I've personally noticed problems with compat4x, compat5x, and the linux emulation packages. 

At the moment, I wish Just Journal had a poll feature.  We started talking about packages to include in the first release.  There is a balance between packing too much cruft and not enough software that people need.  With our ports system, its possible for end users to install additional software.  At the same time, our target audience is not the typical CLI friendly BSD user.  Out of the box, we need a few basics working.  I'd rather not turn this into the typical bloated linux distro.  I also doubt my mirrors would be happy with me if I started shipping four disc installers.  One or two is the ideal target. 

ctriv has been planning the mport library that will be used by pkg_tool replacements and the GUI mport interface which will be developed by raven (nightlily on IRC). 

I've mostly been testing ports and playing around with sysinstall a bit.  I need to write a new installer, but for the first release we plan on using a modified sysinstall.

1 comments

Comments

Binary Ports

userctriv
Thu, 19 Apr 2007 04:00:00 +0000

There isn't a single reason why binary ports have issues, it has to do with how the ports are made. A port that builds something tends to have a build system. Most modern build systems have the bits we need to fake without any extra work. The problem is that binary ports tend to be cute. They tend to be the work of the person that made the port. They tend to be written for FreeBSD's port system, instead of wide range of environments such as, say, gawk.