Please create a -current forum

ralphbsz said:
If we have a subforum for current, most questions posted there should be answered with "either isolate the bug and post it on the mailing list, or stop using current".
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That's somewhat hostile and dismissive.

Instead, can people learn to simply ignore content that they don't want to see?

A popular request:

xenforo.com

Ignore / Filter System

This is from one of my older posts, but it was several different ideas, and I rather this one be added rather then any of the others. Ignore/Filter System One thing I've noticed that is currently lacking (In the form of user ignore) currently, and that most forums do not extend more then the...
xenforo.com xenforo.com

In the absence of a systematic feature to ignore, or filter, I like to think that each one of us has:
  • the human ability to look away from things that we don't want to see.
A sub-forum for CURRENT will make CURRENT discussions easy to avoid for people who do not want to help with CURRENT.
 
forquare said:
… the forums provide a good balance of support and discussion and accessibility. …
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True.

forquare said:
… I never saw these forums purely as a support forum, but also a place for people to discuss around and enthuse about FreeBSD. We do have plenty of discussion that I don't think falls into a "support" capacity. …
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True.

Plenty, and CURRENT is no more a trigger than anything else.

ShelLuser said:
… broken by design …
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False.

scottro said:
Like most bikeshed threads on the forum, this one …
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CURRENT is important.

Please, let's not mistreat this topic as bikeshedding.

grahamperrin said:
Too often: users of RELEASE and STABLE don't state a version …
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Do these posts result in exclusionary tactics towards users of FreeBSD RELEASE?

I hope not. We can, and should, help (or look away, if there's nothing constructive to add).
 
grahamperrin said:
Instead, can people learn to simply ignore content that they don't want to see?
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I try and do this - if the question seems so easy to answer from internet searching or trying something or RTFMing - there's no point in mashing the keyboard to say that.

Let someone with more patience than me spend the time explaining something to someone who could (probably!) have found the answer with five minutes effort. But being rude doesn't help anyone so breathe, ignore, breathe and move on.

But it feels a bit rude that they were happy to type the question into a forum rather than into a search engine so that can sometimes provoke a bit of a negative response. CURRENT is probably a bit of a special case, though.

Ultimately as you say though - ignore it, move on. If someone else has the patience and kindness, let them deal with it and the world is a better place. 😇
 
msplsh said:
The mods don't
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It's not my style to report content to moderators. (Maybe once, twice a year? Honestly, I don't recall making any report in 2021.)

<https://forums.freebsd.org/account/ignored> is more effective, and does not waste the time of moderators.

Some offensive content, I ignore and do not report. It's my quiet barometer of whether FreeBSD Forums is generally a nice place to be. The one most offensive item, which might result in suspension or a ban if reported, was liked by: no-one. This tells me that ☑ most people here are nice.
 
grahamperrin said:
False.
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You sure don't understand your basics: CURRENT is "broken by design", heck, even the official documentation states as much for that same reason. So... Uhm... I guess you know better than the people who actually maintain FreeBSD? All uncontrolled active development goes into this release.

Yah, right! 🙄

Unlike yourself I can back up my claim with facts. Got anything more other than "Because I said so"?

(edit)

OMG... Ralphh is a troll now because he disagreed with you and you got butthurt over that? Yah, I think I've seen enough here.
 
msplsh said:
That's not the point. Extra area to patrol.


Not really, if there's nobody capable of helping. I would not bother in a -CURRENT thread knowing there could be a patch dropping the next day.
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I envision -CURRENT subforum as a way for users to have some exposure to the development process. Yeah, devs have mailing lists, Bugzilla, git repos, etc. I know we have links to all that published at , but I'm seeing a bit of a disconnect between what devs have and what forums have. Some of that disconnect is probably intentional - devs would not want clueless users mucking up the process.
 
Tieks said:
Let's hope they'll design something better then... :confused:
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They did, it's called STABLE and if you want even better quality then RELENG is the way to go, as in: an official release. Don't forget that one of the reasons CURRENT exists and has been made public is to allow people to help the developers test stuff.

Most developers work in their own free time using their own computer(s?). Generally speaking one developer does not have the resources to test their work on a large variety of hardware, which is where CURRENT comes in; allowing people to try out the changes on their own hardware. Yet that immediately implies that there are no guarantees. You could literally upgrade your source tree and end up with code that doesn't even compile or doesn't properly work on your end. It could even go as far as to brick your entire system because things no longer boot anymore.

The one thing people need to learn understand is that FreeBSD isn't like Linux (which I suspect is the underlying problem here: the huge difference in mindset). On FreeBSD there are areas where people are expected to understand what they're getting themselves into, areas like CURRENT. Don't expect others to help you figuring out why some things won't work because the idea is actually for you to find out and then report those findings back to the devs, that would actually help advance the project.
 
grahamperrin said:
True. More importantly, I'm not aware of hostility in the freebsd-current list. Not everyone there is a developer.
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Yeah, and I'm noticing that some people have a hard time distinguishing between a simple explanation of expectations (Hey, if you wanna participate, you have to have a good handle on git) and openly hostile commentary (Like name-calling, passing judgement on decisions, threats to ban user IP, reporting to forum/list mod). Yeah, it can be frustrating to consistently run into situations where you can't keep your nose above the water, so to speak. You can either avoid the open water altogether, and complain about how shark-infested it is out there, or you can learn to swim, pick your spots wisely, and deal with situations appropriately.
 
eternal_noob said:
Maybe the future -CURRENT subforum would help to evolve these clueless users to full blown devs. Kind of "FreeBSD development university".
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The stated reason for not having a subform is because of the lack of people to interact with it, which is the same sort of problem this idea will run into.
 
grahamperrin said:
the last bug that I reported resulted in a next day patch,
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I'm sometimes reciprocally sarcastic, however I don't think it sarcastic to mention a next-day patch for a bug report.

Imagine: people being pleased to know that things can be patched – and fixed (four days later) so quickly.

ShelLuser said:
basics: CURRENT is "broken by design", heck, even the official documentation states as much
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Please, can anyone suggest a search phrase that will find something like "broken by design"?

In the meantime, please consider what's below, and the comments under <https://forums.freebsd.org/profile-posts/3676/>. Thanks.


FreeBSD 14.0-CURRENT is not broken by design

Code: 
% date ; su -
Fri  4 Feb 2022 01:15:13 GMT
Password:
root@mowa219-gjp4-8570p-freebsd:~ # gh repo sync grahamperrin/freebsd-doc && cd /usr/doc && gh repo sync && git -C /usr/ports pull --ff-only && git -C /usr/src pull --ff-only && cd
✓ Synced the "grahamperrin:main" branch from "freebsd:main"
✓ Synced the "main" branch from grahamperrin/freebsd-doc to local repository
Already up to date.
Already up to date.
root@mowa219-gjp4-8570p-freebsd:~ # exit
logout
% grep -i -B 3 \ broken /usr/src/UPDATING

20210105:
        ncurses installation has been modified to only keep the widechar
        enabled version.  Incremental build is broken for that change, so it
--
20181126:
        On amd64, arm64 and armv7 (architectures that install LLVM's ld.lld
        linker as /usr/bin/ld) GNU ld is no longer installed as ld.bfd, as
        it produces broken binaries when ifuncs are in use.  Users needing
--
20180727:
        Atmel AT91RM9200 and AT91SAM9, Cavium CNS 11xx and XScale
        support has been removed from the tree. These ports were
        obsolete and/or known to be broken for many years.
--

20180705:
        The ABI of syscalls used by management tools like sockstat and
        netstat has been broken to allow 32-bit binaries to work on
--
        sync because, when they were originally added to FreeBSD, the
        upstream versions were not respected.  These libraries are private
        and not yet built by default, so renumbering them should be a
        non-issue.  However, unclean source trees will yield broken test
--
        behavior of incremental builds inside the tree of individual
        directories. Set MAKESYSPATH to ".../share/mk" to do that.
        Although this has survived make universe and some upgrade scenarios,
        other upgrade scenarios may have broken. At least one form of
% grep -r -i "broken by design" /usr/doc/documentation/
% grep -r -i "broken by design" /usr/src/
Binary file /usr/src/.git/objects/pack/pack-2e543e0c43e4c89d74cc419c35436ef3159baf7e.pack matches
Binary file /usr/src/.git/objects/pack/pack-a6cd480fd8a7e9c8e0bf2ddc9bfaff8856f32ffc.pack matches
/usr/src/sys/arm/nvidia/drm2/tegra_dc.c:                 * XXXX - this is broken by design - client can write to BO at
/usr/src/contrib/llvm-project/llvm/lib/Target/PowerPC/PPCFrameLowering.cpp:  // FIXME: This is pretty much broken by design: hasFP() might be called really
/usr/src/contrib/sqlite3/sqlite3.c:** POSIX advisory locks are broken by design.  ANSI STD 1003.1 (1996)
%

The three matches:
 
grahamperrin said:
Please, can anyone suggest a search phrase that will find something like "broken by design"?
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From the handbook:
FreeBSD-CURRENT is the very latest source code for FreeBSD and includes works in progress, experimental changes, and transitional mechanisms that might or might not be present in the next official release. While many FreeBSD developers compile the FreeBSD-CURRENT source code daily, there are short periods of time when the source may not be buildable. These problems are resolved as quickly as possible, but whether or not FreeBSD-CURRENT brings disaster or new functionality can be a matter of when the source code was synced.
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I like the last one emphasized by me. ;)
 
grahamperrin said:
FreeBSD 14.0-CURRENT is not broken by design
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I think what ShelLuser and a few others are trying to say is that when version X is 'broken by design', it means this:
  • 'Broken' part refers to the fact that this whole enchilada is not very stable, it can break at any time, even if it feels stable for the moment.
  • 'By design' part part refers to the fact that this branch of the code is intended for receiving daily changes based on bug reports and other sources of information. That's why we have the -current tag on the code.
I can kind of see that 14.0-CURRENT is stabilizing, but it still has to have its development stages declared done before the -current tag can be dropped. The -current tag is part of the design.

Edit: In the past, I did compare the -current FreeBSD code to bowls of Jell-o:
forums.freebsd.org

Solved - Trying to install FreeBSD 13.0 on HP ZBook 15 G6

Hi, I am trying to install Free BSD on HP ZBook 15 G6 following handbook. I didn't get very far because my computer freezes after BOOT Menu and printing masks 0x00ff0000 0x0000ff00 0xff000000. I did try "safe mode" but nothing changed. I am pretty intrigued by the fact that FreeBSD 14.0 boots...
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org
 
grahamperrin said:
Extremely unlikely, if there's sensible use of ZFS boot environments, and boot environments are not peculiar to CURRENT; they're widely recommended.
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eternal_noob said:
… whether or not FreeBSD-CURRENT brings disaster or new functionality can be a matter of when the source code was synced.
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I like the last one emphasized by me. ;)
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I prefer:
  • the first one emphasised by me
  • free from disaster.
 
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