After years of frustration voiced by many committers over time, Pav finally put the word out to remove CVSROOT/modules. It only adds a shorthand for checking out ports, so only the port name needs to be typed and not the full path, i.e. ports/$category/$portname. However, this can be easily achieved by a short shellscript (for other committers, see ~erwin/bin/coport on freefall for an example), and it takes quite an effort to maintain the modules file, as you can guess from its revision number of 1.20060. I would know, for some time I’ve been running a nightly script to check if all entries are done right and/or are missing and informing committers if anything is amiss. Thus, after considering the cost vs. benefit, I have emptied the file and edited addport/rmport to no longer edit it. Adding a new port was never this easy.

Oh, and it’s not every day you got to commit to a file and remove over 18.000 lines from it. Yay!

So far, I’ve had a wonderful day. It started by trying to figure out why several hundred of packages are failing on i386-6. After a long time trying to find a general pattern, I boiled it down to xorg-libraries. It turns out that when Kris did some spring cleaning and removed the /usr/X11R6 directory from bindist, it is now a symlink created during pre-install in xorg-libraries. What happens next on deinstall is that pkg-install sees the symlink and edits several /etc files to remove the mention of X11R6 there so those scripts are not run twice. As the removal of X11R6 in /etc was not MFCed to RELENG_6, this means that those files are changes and thus show up as leftovers on pointyhat.

So far so good. Now, how to fix this:

1. MFC the changes to /etc. This may break existing installations, but only if src is updated and not ports.
2. Readd the directory to bindist on 6 so the symlink isn’t created and pkg-install does not edit /etc. Nasty hack.
3. Don’t run pkg-install during PACKAGE_BUILDING. This is already set in Makefile, but not in the package. And now comes the fun part. Moving this to the package will cause problems as PACKAGE_BUILDING is set during sysinstall, so installing xorg packages from sysinstall will leave X11R6 behind in /etc.

Stay tuned for fixes.

The FreeBSD Foundation generously sponsored my plane ticket for BSDCan this year. I wrote a few words about what I did at the conference, apart from the pub track of course, and some of you that weren’t there, might be interesting to see what actually happens at BSDCan when people are not listening to talks or out drinking beer, so here it is:

I held a short talk at the DevSummit on the state of the ports tree and
an update on the work portmgr is doing these days and some of the larger
issues we are facing (slides). I also held a BOF at the conference
itself on ports in general. Unfortunately, not many people turned up but
those who did got some pointers on how to start more actively contributing
to FreeBSD ports and we discussed some more general ports related subjects.

In addition to the official track, I held several informal meetings.
The upcoming release schedule for the next many releases was discussed
with the release engineering and security teams. Together with another
portmgr member, Mark Linimon, I met George Neville-Neil on behalf of the
core team to discuss a specific personnel issue that got escalated. I
also had lunch with the two other portmgr members attending, Mark
Linimon and Joe Marcus Clark for a general discussion on portmgr
issues. I cornered Ken Smith on how to start helping out on contacting
ftp administrators of outdated and/or incomplete mirrors, and cleaning
up the list of mirror sites. Additionally, I had some brainstorming
talks with Peter Losher of ISC, who runs the US half of ftp.freebsd.org
while I run the EU half, on optimizing mirror synchronization and
creating some statistics on downloads, which Mark Linimon was willing to
analyse if we could provide him the data.

All in all, a very productive conference, with lots of minor issues very
easily resolved over a glass of coffee/beer/milk, than over e-mail. A
lot of thanks to the FreeBSD Foundation for sponsoring the trip.