I love FreeBSD: I wish ports were up to date

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eydaimon said:
I don't know the cause. I just know I keep running into ports that are old or take weeks/months to be updated. I'm speculating. There's no way I have time to update every single port I come across. If it's as simple as just tweaking the Makefile to another version, and doing a pull-request, sure. That's not been my experience though.
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Good point! Unless one gets paid, maintenance is a hobby. Few people can afford putting a lot of effort into it. And it comes at no cost to us, so I think even if it's not perfect, it's damn good quality for a free system!
What would motivate well to maintain a port would be in my opinion one of two cases: (1) someone needs it badly for private purposes, maintains the software and shares with the community; (2) a company needs it to do its business, so it sponsors developers to maintain the software (for example, iX Systems and FreeNAS).
 
eydaimon said:
I don't know the cause. I just know I keep running into ports that are old or take weeks/months to be updated.
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If you want to use the software from a port, but it has not been maintained (which means that there isn't enough volunteer manpower to maintain it), then you have two choices. Either take over the work of maintaining / update the port yourself, or don't use that software. In theory you could try to get volunteers to work harder, or find new volunteers; in practice that doesn't work, so there is no third option: tertium non datur.

You may find that there is a whole lot of packages that are "related" to each other than don't have ports to your satisfaction. Where "related" might mean that they are solve similar problems, or have similar dependencies. From the reports it seems those dependencies are often GUI toolkit things (Qt, GTK, KDE, ...). Maybe this means that FreeBSD is not suitable for a certain type of user and a certain type of application.

There's no way I have time to update every single port I come across. If it's as simple as just tweaking the Makefile to another version, and doing a pull-request, sure. That's not been my experience though.
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I've only had to compile from ports very few times, perhaps 8 or 10 times in the last ~10 years of using it. All the rest I install from packages, and they works "perfectly" (and I put perfectly in quotes: sometimes software does exactly what it advertises, and then I find that this is not what I wanted or needed so I delete it again). For compiling from ports, I've never had to do more than do a pull (or download the source from a commonly known location), adjust the makefile, and compile. But then, I only use FreeBSD as a server platform (never as a desktop or GUI machine). I think there is a strong hint in there what type of uses FreeBSD is suitable for.
 
What wont be helping maintainers is it seems almost every year the process changes, e.g. the staging process. Some will likely be doing it with minimum amount of free time, and if they keep having to learn changes they may just give up.
 
I used to use Weatherspect on my machines for the ASCII art that went along with the weather forecasts. It stopped working so I contacted the maintainer with shots of the problems.

He replied right away and it was an issue with WeatherUndergound not providing the service for free anymore. It couldn't be fixed and he said it would be removed.

I'm more concerned with multimedia/xmms. It's a dead project upstream and now it won't build due to a dependency issue. I started using it with Linux and is the only audio player I like.

Nyakov said:
I think this is conceptual problem. Software meant to be used, not to be builded, it is not the purpose of software. The same is relevant to the OS itself.
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Now you're opening a whole new can of worms.
 
It appears kde.org maintains the FreeBSD ports for their own stuff and they've been doing a great job IMO. Good support and an apparently good relationship with FreeBSD are two of the several reasons I picked KDE over other DEs available on FreeBSD. Version 5.15.3 came out Tues, March 12 and the plasma5-plasma port is already up to date; they've been putting out new updates about every week or so.

From another point of view, some consider a slower revision schedule to be a measure of stability, and there's a lot of merit in that argument too. It's good to be able to keep using a good stable version of something without worrying so much about keeping up with all the latest updates all the time. Chasing the latest updates is something I associate with Windows and Ubuntu. It's hard to do development when the OS provider keeps pulling the rug out from under you with updates which are too frequent, too untested, and which sometimes can even be completely unanticipated. If software works well and as expected, there's really no need to be in any big hurry to update.
 
roccobaroccoSC said:
And it comes at no cost to us, so I think even if it's not perfect, it's damn good quality for a free system!
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We all here part of community, not the buyers and not the sellers.
And the cost have nothing to do with quality. Quality can be of any value.
And for user cost can came in other ways.

What can motivate people, is, low entry point, and friendly community.

roccobaroccoSC said:
: (1) someone needs it badly for private purposes, maintains the software and shares with the community;
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Or just installs linux.
 
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