Okay, this may seem like a silly question, but it seems the the rate of new ports has tapered off and we're treading water at near 4000. No doubt that will creep up slowly, but I see Fink has roughly 8,000 and FreeBSD double that. Is that because they have more legacy software that we don't use? I just wonder what type of stuff they have that we don't, especially since it seems like we're not missing too much that people are asking for. What is it about our user base that makes us content with 1/2 the number of available ports? Or is it just me? Are we content with our available ports? Mark
I'm usual the cynical one around here, but I actually think this is because MacPorts has been putting a lot of time, lately, into improving its infrastructure rather than focusing on continuously adding (and subsequently maintaining) ports through sheer brute-force. FreeBSD has over 15,000 ports largely because they put a huge amount of time into building all their ports on a regular basis, collecting the build results, and making regular status information available to maintainers (see http://portsmon.freebsd.org/) so that the overall collection does not become completely unmanageable. I think the new MP crew has seen that there's still a lot of work to do in QA, making port descriptions more powerful and/or concise, and implementing commonly requested features in order to support future ports that don't fit into the current system very well, and they've wisely chosen to focus on these things rather than just expanding the collection. That's a good thing. :-) That said, I don't think anyone is actively discouraging anyone from adding more ports, it's just a question of where the focus is right now. There has been quite a lot of work put into cleaning up and adding ports, a lot of time also going into figuring out how to use the new trac system at macosforge and adapting the project's processes to fit the new infrastructure. - Jordan On Apr 30, 2007, at 12:53 AM, markd@macports.org wrote:
Okay, this may seem like a silly question, but it seems the the rate of new ports has tapered off and we're treading water at near 4000. No doubt that will creep up slowly, but I see Fink has roughly 8,000 and FreeBSD double that. Is that because they have more legacy software that we don't use? I just wonder what type of stuff they have that we don't, especially since it seems like we're not missing too much that people are asking for. What is it about our user base that makes us content with 1/2 the number of available ports? Or is it just me? Are we content with our available ports?
Mark
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Jordan K. Hubbard
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markd＠macports.org