On Fri, 11 Oct 1996 08:12:15 -0700 
 "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> wrote:

 > It would be trivial to make allowances for an ARCH indirection in the
 > package creation process, and I think the OpenBSD folks have already
 > done so, in fact.  Any interested parties might, in fact, wish to go
 > take a look their ports tree - the CVS repo is up for public access.

FWIW, I integrated the FreeBSD `ports' stuff into my NetBSD tree.  I sent
several changes in the form of bug reports to FreeBSD that make their
package tools and other things actually work on non-i386 systems (my
main test platform was NetBSD/alpha).  Most of them have been integrated
into FreeBSD, which I think is good.  I don't think my changes to the
Message Digest stuff have been committed to FreeBSD yet, which is too
bad; those changes are absolutely necessary for md[45] to work on
64-bit systems.

However, when I sent changes to the bsd.port*.mk files, they met with
considerable resistance, and explanations about why I chose to do things
they way I did them met with "well that doesn't fit with my view of
the world".  Most of my changes were dealing with the different
pathnames some things would have in the NetBSD world.  Since the
decisions on pathnames were made a run-time, I don't really see why
it was such a big deal, but whatever.  Some of the other changes
were for dealing with the fact that shared libraries don't work on
3 NetBSD architectures.

I guess some of these things got resolved, until I was basically told
that it was pointless, since most of the patches in the `ports' collection
use #ifdef __FreeBSD__ ... Unfortunately, I haven't had any time to
pursue it further, lately.

So, you could say that I'm mildly annoyed at the fact that I made
several of these changes, and fed them back to FreeBSD, where they
met with some resistance, and now very similar changes (made by someone
else) are called the right thing to do.

Jordan - please be fair when talking about making allowances for an
ARCH indirection in the package creation process.

Jason R. Thorpe                                       thorpej@nas.nasa.gov
NASA Ames Research Center                               Home: 408.866.1912
NAS: M/S 258-6                                          Work: 415.604.0935
Moffett Field, CA 94035                                Pager: 415.428.6939