end of 2.2-stable support and the future of ports (fwd)

[Czanik Peter]

Hello,
	Ugy tunik, ha hat nap kesessel is, de megszuletett. Vmi mirror
mikorra varhato? Mert en rogton telepitenem is... Bye,
	Peter

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Wed, 20 Jan 1999 20:55:30 -0800 (PST)
From: Satoshi Asami <asami at FreeBSD.ORG>
To: announce at FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: end of 2.2-stable support and the future of ports

Hello world,

Well, the time has finally come.  The 3.0 tree was branched to
3.1-stable (RELENG_3) and 4.0-current (HEAD) today.

As has been announced before, the support for the 2.2 branch by the
ports team has now officially ended.  New ports will no longer
required to be tested on 2.2.  Also, ELF has been the default format
for the 3.0 branch for some time, so now seems like a good time to
declare the end of a.out support too.

We will not yank 2.2/a.out support from existing ports, but will not
require 2.2 or a.out support be preserved across port updates either.
This means that the numbef of ports that can be compiled on 2.2 will
slowly decrease over time.  In a few months' time, I will remove all
2.2/a.out support from bsd.port*.mk.  That will finally free us from
all the kludges we had to put into the system and the ports tree in
order to make a smooth (relatively speaking -- don't laugh) transition
from 2.2/a.out to 3.0/ELF.

I will build the final snapshot of packages-2.2-stable tonight and put
it up on ftp.freebsd.org.  It will be kept there for a few months, but
will not be updated except for the "upgrade kits".  I will do my best
to keep the upgrade kits in sync, but as I no longer have 2.2 machines
around, I can't make any guarantees.  (Also, as I said above, the
ports themselves will evolve away from the 2.2 branch, and there will
be more and more ports that can't be built even with the upgrade kits.
Please move to 3.1-stable soon. :)

As for the new branches, new ports are required to build on both
3.1-stable and 4.0-current.  For now, i386 packages will be built for
3.1-stable only; I will start building packages for both branches when
it seems necessary (right now they are identical so it's rather
pointless to divide the resources).  Since we now have the 8-machine
"package building cluster" running at full speed, we should be able to
build the packages with a much shorter turnaround time.  We will also
start providing packages for the alpha platform, although when exactly
that will happen is still up in the air at the moment.

Since I'm posting to -announce, I would also like to take this
opportunity to thank Walnut Creek CDROM for providing us with the
cluster to automate package building, and all the people involved in
the ports collection (especially those who are committing new ports
and fixing existing ones like madmen -- you know who you are :) for
all the great work you have done.  It is a gross understatement to
merely state that we couldn't have reached this point (2,044 ports!) 
without you.

Sincerely,
Satoshi (and the invincible ports team)

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