Ports Feature Freeze for FreeBSD 8.3 is now in effect
March 9, 2012 by tabthorpe · Leave a Comment
FreeBSD 8.3 RC1 has been pulicly announced, it is now time for the the
Ports Feature Freeze.
Normal upgrade, new ports, and changes that only affect other branches
will be allowed without prior approval, but with the extra
Feature safe: yes
tag in the commit message. Any commit that is sweeping, i.e. touches a
large number of ports, infrastructural changes, commits to ports with
unusually high number of dependencies, and any other commit that requires
the rebuilding of many packages will not be allowed without prior explicit
approval from portmgr@ after that date.
Thomas
on behalf of portmgr@
Upcoming 8.3 ports feature freeze
February 19, 2012 by tabthorpe · Leave a Comment
The FreeBSD 8.3 release process is under way, you can view the schedule,
http://wiki.freebsd.org/Releng/8.3TODO.
As has become the custom, a ports feature freeze is anticipated to be
announced with the RC1 date, tentatively scheduled at this time
for March 2, 2012. Watch for further announcements as we get closer.
During the feature freeze, committers are expected to be conservative with
their commits, that is, no sweeping commits, infrastructure changes, or
commits to ports with a high number of dependencies.
FreeBSD 9.0 ports slush is over
January 16, 2012 by tabthorpe · Leave a Comment
Just to make it officially official, now that FreeBSD 9.0 has been shipped, the ports slush state is now been lifted.
Ports committers are now entitled to perform sweeping commits. Keep in mind that -exp runs are always a good idea if you think there is a significant change to the ports tree.
And just remember, PLEASE TRY TO NOT BREAK THE INDEX!
Thomas
on behalf of portmgr@
New ports announce mailing list
December 29, 2011 by tabthorpe · Leave a Comment
At the request of adamw@ (and others) we have setup a ports-announce@ mailing list to try distinguish the usual traffic on the ports@ list vs the announcements that seem to get lost in there.
You can subscribe at http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports-announce
It is intended, but not limited, to be a means of communicating portmgr@ announcements, Calls for Testing, plus other relevant information to be used by our committers and ports maintainer community.
It is our hope to keep this relatively low in traffic. It is a moderated list, under the auspices of portmgr@.
Please subscribe, sit back, and enjoy.
Thomas
on behalf of portmgr@
Please welcome Beat Gaetzi to the Ports Management team
We are pleased to announce the addition of Beat Gaetzi (beat@) to the team. Beat, like many others was a long time contributor prior to receiving his commit bit in 2009. Beat is well know for his work with the Gecko and Vbox teams, in addition to his hosting of test/development repositories for many of our community members.
Beat’s next unenviable task will be taking us through the rocky road ahead in migrating the CVS Ports repository to Subversion.
Please join me in welcoming Beat to the team. Congratulations Beat!
Thomas
on behalf of portmgr@
Feature freeze for 9.0 is now in effect
November 10, 2011 by tabthorpe · Leave a Comment
With this commit, http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=227337, the RC2 phase is under way.
Normal upgrade, new ports, and changes that only affect other branches will be allowed without prior approval, but with the extra
Feature safe: yes
tag in the commit message. Any commit that is sweeping, i.e. touches a large number of ports, infrastructural changes, commits to ports with
unusually high number of dependencies, and any other commit that requires
the rebuilding of many packages will not be allowed without prior explicit approval from portmgr@ after that date.
Thomas
on behalf of portmgr@
FreeBSD portmgr thank you to the FreeBSD Foundation
May 26, 2011 by tabthorpe · Leave a Comment
We would like to publicly thank the FreeBSD Foundation for granting Baptiste Daroussin and Julien Laffaye a travel grant to travel to BSDCan 2011 for the Ports and Packages Working Group held at in Ottawa last week. The working group itself was a huge success and a number of improvements with regard to automated binary package creation and distribution to ease upgrade procedures for our users were discussed and will hopefully be implemented over the next few months.
None of these improvements, however, would be possible without a long overdue rewrite of the package tools provided by FreeBSD. Over last few years, a number of attempts were made to enhance the current tools, but none have been as all-compassing as the PKGNG project by Baptiste and Julien. The presentation given by Baptiste at the packages summit and summariszed at the DevSummit track of BSDCan showed a comprehensive new tool that can completely replace the current tools, and provide a clear migration path from the old to the new tool. It also provides a large number of new features while keeping the old ones and is a lot more flexible to be able to add more features later. As you may have heard, Baptiste has also joined the ports management team as a result of his efforts.
Thanks again to the Foundation for sponsoring Baptiste, Julien, Simon Nielsen (Deputy Security Officer) and Thomas Abthorpe (Ports Management Team) who all were instrumental into making the ports working group such a success.
Thomas
on behalf of portmgr@
So long HP Blade Cluster and thanks for all the packages
After many years of faithful service, today the FreeBSD Ports Management Team decided to decommission the HP Blade Cluster. When the 20-node BladeSystem was donated to the FreeBSD Foundation, by Hewlett-Packard back in 2005, it tripled the speed of the i386 package building process. Today, and several hardware generations later however, it is no longer profitable to keep the system running inside the cluster. The portmgr team has been very pleased with the system, especially the built-in out-of-band power management- and console system. The system has also proved to be very reliable; even with continuous high workloads for so many years, the only hardware failures we experienced were some of the disks. The i386 package cluster now consists of 5 Xeon-based servers hosted at ISC until the new clusters are fully online.
We again wish to thank HP for their generous donation and Yahoo! for hosting it in one of their datacenter.
New portmgr member: Baptiste Daroussin
May 12, 2011 by erwin · 2 Comments
Portmgr is pleased to announce that Baptiste Daroussin, bapt@, has joined the ranks of the Ports Management team. He has been working hard on some large infrastructure improvements, including a new OPTIONS framework and PKGNG that will replace the current pkg_* tools and bring them into the 21 century. We are very happy to have him onboard, where he will continue working on these and other much needed infrastructure improvements with the full power of the pointyhats.
Ports and Packages for Supported Releases
May 12, 2011 by erwin · Leave a Comment
Portmgr published a new page on their website which describes the current support and EoL policies for the ports tree and released packages. The main take-home messages are:
- Support of FreeBSD releases by ports and the ports infrastructure matches the policies set out by the FreeBSD Security Officer.
- Package builds will use the oldest supported minor release within each major branch to ensure ABI and KBI backwards compatability within each major branch, and support all minor versions of each major branch, including -RELEASE and -STABLE.
See the full policy on the portmgr webpage.