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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!agate!darkstar.UCSC.EDU!news.hal.COM!olivea!decwrl!pa.dec.com!usenet.pa.dec.com!jkh From: jkh@nx.ilo.dec.com (Jordan Hubbard) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development Subject: Re: Request to ``ports'' developers Date: 26 May 1994 23:08:34 GMT Organization: Digital Equipment Corporation, Galway Ireland Lines: 28 Message-ID: <JKH.94May27000834@nx.ilo.dec.com> References: <2s291q$pnl@meatball.rwwa.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: nx.ilo.dec.com In-reply-to: witr@rwwa.com's message of 26 May 1994 09:43:22 -0400 In article <2s291q$pnl@meatball.rwwa.com> witr@rwwa.com (Robert Withrow) writes: Since the ports stuff is (apparently) using CVS, it would be trivial for the developers to produce patch files for their changes (as was done with the emacs distribution). It would be more `trivial' now, but regrettable has not been the case until recently. The problem (and I'm just as guilty as anyone in the ports hacker group, if not more so) is that we didn't really understand CVS that well when we started, and what we did was take some bits, port them, then check the whole thing into CVS. This was WRONG WRONG WRONG. What we should have done instead was take the _virgin distribution bits_, check them in, THEN bring the FreeBSD changes over and commit them on the head. When the next release came along, we could have then imported it on a vendor branch and used cvs merge to bring the changes onto the head (`FreeBSD branch'). Live in learn, as they say, and I've been quietly nuking out old ports completely and re-committing the latest version again as a vendor commit with the FreeBSD changes on top, but this takes time and hasn't been done for even a reasonable fraction of the ports yet. Our current operational plan is to make `doing it right' a pre-requisite for bringing a port from the FreeBSD 1.x into the 2.x. branch, so at that time the ports may trickle over more slowly, but at least they'll trickly over correctly. Jordan