"How can I help with pkgsrc?" FAQ

[Hasso Tepper]

Q: Pkgsrc sucks!
A: Yes, I know.

Q: But shouldn't we look at alternatives then?
A: There is really none. We just can't take random packaing management 
   system and modify to our needs. We don't have resources for that. 
   Really, believe me. Btw, one of best ways to piss me off is to start 
   discussion regarding this again.

Q: But I'm willing to do all the porting work myself!
A: Unless you really do and make all these thousands packages build and 
   work for us (pkgsrc have more than 8000 at the moment), don't expect 
   to see any helping hand.

Q: But how can I really help?
A: That's the right question. There are several areas where I'd like to 
   see a little help from community.

   * Not all packages which are there and building on DragonFly don't 
     really work. I started to use http://bugs.dragonflybsd.org to track 
     these issues (tagged with "pkgsrc" keyword). Take a issue, fix it and 
     submit patches.

   * Not all packages build on DragonFly. Take a look at pbulk logs at 
     http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~hasso/pbulk-logs/ to identify packages 
     which don't build for some time (random failures are mostly fixed by 
     the time you see the log). Note, that I will not accept patches to 
     make build historic versions you might find in the pkgsrc. If you 
     care, please update the package at first and then make it build and 
     work on DragonFly.

   * There is a lot of packages in the pkgsrc which build and work fine, 
     but only do because of patches applied from pkgsrc. It's really 
     important that these patches will go into their upstreams really. 
     Find a such package from pkgsrc tree, find out how to submit patches 
     to the upstream and do it.
 
     But, please do it in polite way, submit patches against upstream 
     repository, test it before submitting, explain non-obvious parts of 
     patches (you can ask from me if you have problems understanding some 
     parts of the patches) etc. Upstreams are mostly very friendly (there 
     are exceptions of course) and fast pushing patches into releases, 
     it's really only putting a little bit time and effort into it.

     "Take a look at these patches there, commit them or die!" isn't a
     polite way, btw ;).


Thank you!

-- 
Hasso Tepper