Subject: Re: FreeBSD version (was Re: Type 1 postscript font support questions...)
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Tue Jun 06 2000 - 16:28:20 CDT
Mike,
Thanks for following up on the 3.4 vs. 4.0 issues. For the most part, the
FreeBSD builds have Just Worked for us, so we've been skating by for quite a
while without an official maintainer.
At 02:32 PM 6/5/00 -0500, Mike Meyer wrote:
>Ugh. 3.4 uses an antique version of gcc as the default compiler (2.7?
>2.72?). 4.0 upgraded to 2.95.2 (hurrah), which could well be the
>source of the problem.
Sounds plausible. One of the facts of life about being XP is that for every
finicky new compiler we support, our sources have to get even cleaner. Over
the long term, this is a very Good Thing.
In the short term, though, it can be mighty annoying. :-(
>I can't help much with those questions, as I don't know the answers. I
>believe the FreeBSD ports collection only works on 4.x and 5.x systems
>(4.x is the stable branch, 5.x is the development branch; -RELEASE is
>a snapshot of the stable branch), but I'm not positive. If that's so,
>then I'd say requiring 4.0 for builds is probably reasonable. If ports
>are required to build on all thee, then it should be a problem.
There are two issues here -- what release do FreeBSD developers prefer to
use when building the sources, and what release is the prototypical
binary-only FreeBSD user most likely to have installed?
I don't know what life is like in the FreeBSD community, but on many of our
more traditional desktop platforms, people who just use binaries tend not to
upgrade their OS anywhere near as often as developers do. Thus, we tend to
be a bit conservative when deciding to upgrade our build machines.
As always, this is the kind of issue where we'd *love* to defer to the
judgement of an active FreeBSD maintainer.
>Well, I thought about it, and it's not something I'm interested in.
>AbiWord isn't the kind of thing I typically enjoy working on.
That's totally understandable. We all work best when we can spend our time
on things we really enjoy. Thanks for even considering it.
>I'm
>contributing fixes so that the fonts I've been using for 10 years will
>work properly (and I'm quite happy to see how quick I'm getting
>feedback on the patches - congratulations to the lot of you).
Cool.
>I've
>added the person responsible for maintaining the FreeBSD port to the
>conversation (assuming he wasn't listening already); he should have
>better input to the questions, and might be interested in doing that,
>as it could make the port mainteance easier.
That'd be ideal. Anyone doing downstream maintenance is highly encouraged
to introduce those changes upstream in our tree so they don't have to be
remerged later on.
In this case, the hurdle for granting CVS access to an active FreeBSD
maintainer should be easily met. :-)
Paul
motto -- CVS is a wonderful tool
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b25 : Tue Jun 06 2000 - 16:22:45 CDT