Date:        Tue, 30 Sep 2003 08:43:17 -0700 (PDT)
    From:        "Jeremy C. Reed" <reed@reedmedia.net>
    Message-ID:  <Pine.LNX.4.43.0309300840150.19793-100000@pilchuck.reedmedia.net>

  | One reason we can't do this is because the FreeBSD ports and the NetBSD
  | pkgsrc are maintained by a variety of volunteers. Using the same distfiles
  | in some cases may mean making changes to patches, Makefiles, and also time
  | to test and verify that it all works.

I don't think the intent of the suggestion was to force the *BSDs to
necessarily use the same versions, etc - just that when the same basic
distfile is used by multiple *BSDs that the version in the same format
(when more than one is available) be used, and that the distfile be
fetched to the same location relative to the distfiles directory (the
same sub-directory if one is used, for example).

  | In other words, it would take a of time and work to do this.

It would take some co-ordination effort, for sure (need to check what
the others are doing, and everyone would need to be doing that).


While I'm here I have a distfile maintenance suggestion I've been meaning
to make, and this seems as good an opportunity as any.

I'd like to see a requirement that nothing go in the distfiles directory
(directly - no recursive application to subdirectories) without a version
number, unless placed in a subdirectory to which this rule is applied
(ie: in that case, the sub-directory name need not have a version number).

That is, no more foo.tgz in distfiles, a subdir foo-1.99 would need to be
used to hold foo.tgz if that's what the distfile is called.   On the other
hand, the "bind" sub-directory is fine (as is xemacs-packages, and more)
as inside bind the sub-directories all have version numbers (and in
xemacs-packages, the tarballs all have version numbers).

I'd also like to see sub-directories used for distfiles where the distfile
name is absurdly generic - we currently have stuff like 6x12.tar.gz 
Daemon.README HardImage1.gz bugfix.txt (and more, 'b' was as far as I
could bring myself to get to in my scan of the ls output...)

Last request - please don't go moving things to implement these rules, or
any other - apply them only to new distfiles for new/upgraded packages.

kre