Re: "up to date at all costs" is a failed approach

[nia <nia%NetBSD.org@localhost>]

On Fri, Jul 19, 2024 at 09:27:36AM +0000, nia wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 15, 2024 at 10:30:32PM +0100, Jonathan Perkin wrote:
> > In this world a package or update would never enter the tree until it has
> > been verified to build correctly on all supported platforms.  The emphasis
> > is on correctness and true stability, rather than the latest version at all
> > cost.
> > 
> > It's a very very different development model to the one that folks in this
> > community are used to, and I expect most people on this list will disagree
> > with it.  That's fine.  However, if anyone is interested and would like to
> > work on it with me, I'd be happy to talk, as like nia I've been burned out
> > for a long time trying to keep up with pkgsrc breakage.
> 
> This is a really attractive model for me, at this point,
> I've been too burned working on getting things to work well then
> seeing it all spiral out of control.
> 
> I would like more extensive versioning at major upgrade points too -
> for example, the last autotools version of glib2 would be really
> nice to have. More than enough for building software like irssi
> and mc, and much nicer for cross-compiling and portability.

I forgot to add: the MacPorts model has convinced me that this
can work.

pkgsrc has all the infrastructure to vastly surpass something like
MacPorts at legacy platform support. But MacPorts is doing far better.
Why? Policy, mostly.