Subject: Re: Proposal: unification of distfiles for FreeBSD and NetBSD
To: Michal Pasternak <michal@pasternak.w.lub.pl>
From: Jeremy C. Reed <reed@reedmedia.net>
List: tech-pkg
Date: 09/30/2003 08:43:17
Your recent email reminded me to reply to this old message.

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.

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

In addition, since in many cases the ports and pkgsrc maintainers are
different people, they don't keep their packages in sync.

Also, some maintainers (for both FreeBSD and NetBSD) do not have commit
privileges, so they have to wait to have their updates done.

By the way, FreeBSD distfile servers area used for NetBSD pkgsrc. It (is
two servers now)  is the third MASTER_SITE_BACKUP.

> FreeBSD has. Why wouldn't I change FreeBSD ports collection?
> FreeBSD seems to be a bit more popular, than NetBSD is - that
> means it has more mirror servers, than NetBSD - at least, in Poland.

If that is the real problem, then maybe you could ask for some volunteers
to host mirrors.

   Jeremy C. Reed
   http://bsd.reedmedia.net/