I'm a long-time Gentoo Linux user and I tried FreeBSD (7.1 Release) a few months ago, had four system crashes in 2 days due to two separate kernel bugs and gave up. But I really like the well-engineered, well-documented, professional aspects of much of the system (better along these dimensions than Linux and even Gentoo, in my opinion), so I've come back to it in a smaller way, installing it on just one of my systems, an i386 (one of the kernel bugs was amd64-specific).
I have been trying since last night to build and install the epiphany port (with portupgrade -R epiphany), because it's several minor versions ahead of the package available with the 7.1 release. I have now run into two broken ports -- x11-toolkits/py-gtk2 and security/gnome-keyring. Both fail to compile (yes, I've entered bug reports). This is a pretty egregious lack of basic software QA. If the damned things don't compile, they couldn't have been tested. What are they doing in the released ports repository?
I wish one of you who has more experience with FreeBSD than I do would tell me whether or not this is typical. If it is, it's a showstopper for me, because I really like the rolling-release capability that ports should provide but haven't for me in this case, and which I'm accustomed to after years of using Gentoo.
/Don Allen
I have been trying since last night to build and install the epiphany port (with portupgrade -R epiphany), because it's several minor versions ahead of the package available with the 7.1 release. I have now run into two broken ports -- x11-toolkits/py-gtk2 and security/gnome-keyring. Both fail to compile (yes, I've entered bug reports). This is a pretty egregious lack of basic software QA. If the damned things don't compile, they couldn't have been tested. What are they doing in the released ports repository?
I wish one of you who has more experience with FreeBSD than I do would tell me whether or not this is typical. If it is, it's a showstopper for me, because I really like the rolling-release capability that ports should provide but haven't for me in this case, and which I'm accustomed to after years of using Gentoo.
/Don Allen