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It's not Linux, but people keep trying to turn it into Gentoo, or Ubuntu, or some other crap and start weird dedicated projects to "improve on BSD" rather than just helping to improve FreeBSD itself. In doing so they tend to completely destroy every advantage of the base system.

Quick questions.
1) Would FBSD be interested in converting all of their ports over to ebuilds, since some folks find ebuilds simpler then the ports equiv? (shoe on the other foot, would gentoo be willing to convert over to ports because some find ports simpler then ebuilds?)
2) Would FBSD be interested in maintaining a repository of ports that work across *bsd (more then just fbsd), and linux?

Ironic thing is that folks could swap linux/bsd from your statement and complain about FBSD if they attempted what G/*BSD is attempting. See the catch-22?

I'd say I personally have about 10 more times of having to explain this before I end up just saying "screw you you lazy know-nothing prick" like other people do, because every response I get will be yet another question that has already been answered 30 times.
Frankly, you just ignore them. Either someone will be willing to respond and help them nicely, or someone will fire off telling them to get bent/die and/or rtfm.

Former (even if no one responds) requires less effort, latter is just firing off at some poor sod (some have it coming, but that doesn't mean all do).

That said... that's not a bsd vs linux thing, that's a "what type of community do we want to build/maintain" thing. There are linux distros that fire off at the newbs just as quickly (maybe a function of age?)...

Personally I wonder what those folks are thinking. Yes the guy making the request needs to google, but that same pita may turn out to be someone who's just hitting a brain fart, someone who if not berated for the sake of frustration might turn to be a useful user/dev contributer.

Berating the dude (ignoring whether or not being a jackass is valid) is dumb from the angle it drives off potential contributors. Granted, if they don't listen after telling them repeatedly how to find out info (eg, they're just being lazy), strong words are useful then, but as first choice? Just seems self-defeating.

Note this isn't pie in the sky "love/hump your neighbor" rhetoric either, have wanted to backhand more then my share of new users, just have also seen cases where that same initial moron in my eyes turned out to not be a moron and made valuable contributions.

Edited 2006-04-12 11:29

Ironic thing is that folks could swap linux/bsd from your statement and complain about FBSD if they attempted what G/*BSD is attempting.

Not to be overly rude, but that's a rather pointless assertion to make. It doesn't really apply to anything.

As a side note: a lot of the people who work on ports also work on pkgsrc (a branch off of ports), which works across a great many more things than *BSD and Linux, so the answer to your second question would seem to be "yes, they would". I think that, in itself, demonstrates that really ports is a better design by nature as it's already been put to use on 12 unrelated systems, compared to the struggle they are going through to get Portage onto a second. That's 12 compared to almost 2.

Now then... you have, it seems, missed the point. The Gentoo/*BSD teams are not bringing portage to another system, they are bringing the other systems to portage. They are not making portage such that it will work on *BSD, they are making BSD such that it will work with their pre-designed software packager. Not only that, but they are doing it to add features that are already there.

Now, that in itself is not generally a problem. In the linux camp it is done all the time. The problem is in the fact that *BSD is a system, not a kernel. Once you start pulling parts of the userland out and swapping them with whatever fits your fancy it's not *BSD anymore.

Yes, what's in a name and all that. However, they are fundamentally destroying the underlying design philosophy of the system in what they are doing. The systems are stable because of how they are built. The reasons behind their choosing *BSD is stated as being that they are stable. If you destroy the base design, the stability goes with it.

So here's the thing. Linux vs. BSD *is* a community thing, it's *only* a community thing. The basic designs underlying the systems stem from the differences in mindset of the people who use and develop them. The things people keep trying to do are contrary to the BSD mindset. Firstly, you should not have a packaging system that depends on anything other than the base system. Secondly, the packaging system should not break if one updates the package database (has been known to happen with year+ old installs of gentoo requiring hand updating of emerge tools). Third, the base system must be constant or you cannot control stability. Giving 4 different options of binutils, 3 of which are "just patched enough to work on FreeBSD" but no more is not offering stability. Did I mention the packaging system shouldn't depend on any odd outside software yet? The simplicity in the design is the reason ports is easily ported.

As was stated in the interview, the original intent was to be able to swap out kernels and userlands independently of each other. That's a linux thing, and outside of "seeing if it can be done" it really has no practical gain from *BSD. It also has absolutely nothing to add to the BSD camp. It can however add to the already existing confusion surrounding them and lead people to poor first impressions of other software systems. Again I say, they should either: Make ports better if they don't like it, or not try to make other things into linux. If they make portage portable, well, that's great. Opensolaris could really use a decent package management solution since blastwave and openpackage have crap in the way of available software. They are not doing that, however. They are not even attempting to do that. This becomes evident by the statement "it would be as hard to get ports running on Gentoo/FreeBSD as on Linux." Ports is a pretty simple system, if you are changing the underlying features that much there is something wrong. That is what I have issue with.

Last side note: I don't have problems with new users, everyone starts somewhere. I have issues with people falling out of place. If you are too lazy to look something up, don't ask someone to do it for you. If you aren't willing to look into something the way it is, don't think it needs to be changed.

say we get very tired of know-nothing people asking us stupid questions that are clearly explained in the easily accessible documentation.

It gets to the point where people stop even answering questions in the mailing lists and just say "search the damn archive you lazy son of a bitch" because we've had to explain it so many times (and yet we're described as friendly compared to the OpenBSD mailing lists). Ports vs. Portage is the same things. I'm about to end up doing it yet again. I'd say I personally have about 10 more times of having to explain this before I end up just saying "screw you you lazy know-nothing prick" like other people do, because every response I get will be yet another question that has already been answered 30 times.

You just gave a perfect example of why I use Gentoo. With people like you using BSD who the hell would be attracted to the platform? Now I rarely visit the Gentoo forums anymore because I am very comfortable with the system but when I did need to ask questions I was sure I would NEVER get an answer like yours.

You don't like being told to do your own work? O.o

Also, that last bit was really intended for something longer I was working on at the time, which was why I included the "about to do it again" part.

And of course nobody words things quite so harshly in actual responses (except perhaps for Theo), in fact *BSD communities are generally spoken of as being far friendlier than Linux communities, which are usually described as "elitist". Everyone thinks it, however, when they see someone being an obvious tick on the side of the community after people spend 100s of hours making easily accessible, easily readable documentation. It is not unreasonable to expect someone to pull their own weight.

And if you ask a question in the forums that is answered in 4000 other threads that are all indexed and archived for easy searching and nobody tells you to get bent then there's something wrong with those people... or maybe they are just used to the laziness. Either way it's not a good thing.

You don't like being told to do your own work? O.o

That's not it at all. I do my own work but even if I didn't, ripping me a new one for asking a question is a little absurd. There is no harm in being polite. Just because you get annoyed at the same question doesn't actually give you the right to be a prick. That's your own attitude problem.

And of course nobody words things quite so harshly in actual responses (except perhaps for Theo), in fact *BSD communities are generally spoken of as being far friendlier than Linux communities, which are usually described as "elitist". Everyone thinks it, however, when they see someone being an obvious tick on the side of the community after people spend 100s of hours making easily accessible, easily readable documentation. It is not unreasonable to expect someone to pull their own weight.

You are right. It is not unreasonable to expect someone to pull their own weight. It is also not unreasonble to expect respect when asking a simple question.

And if you ask a question in the forums that is answered in 4000 other threads that are all indexed and archived for easy searching and nobody tells you to get bent then there's something wrong with those people... or maybe they are just used to the laziness. Either way it's not a good thing.

So what you're saying is that someone isn't normal unless they have elitist, prick attitudes when responding to simple questions that have been answered before. I prefer the gentoo forums way which is a link to the manual and a polite suggestion to search the documentation for the answers.

I use PcBSD as an example. If you are too daft to read the documentation and then figure out how to use the base installer to get a system up and running, frankly you have no business in FreeBSD. Go use Fedora, ubuntu, Suse, or something else designed in such a way that new people are welcomed and can easily learn.

So you want people to feel unwelcome unless they're willing to read a swathe of documentation first? You want FreeBSD to have less users, and thus less developpers? And finally, you want FreeBSD to be less usable unless you can memorise cryptic commands?

That explains a lot.

So you want people to feel unwelcome unless they're willing to read a swathe of documentation first?

You're clouding the issue in a huge way here. If the alternative to reading a 'swathe' of documentation is asking a 'swathe' of questions that were answered yesterday and every day for the past however long, then yes, there is a problem.

Poor documentation is one of the most annoying things about an operating system so when maintainers actually go to the trouble of writing good docs, they damn well want people to use them. Of course, people can't be expected to understand that instantly, but explaining it is often much more productive in the long run than continuing to treat everyone with kid-gloves. Seeing people get flamed (and occasionally getting flamed myself) is what made me realize how much more efficient reading documentation can be, both for me and for the people that already know the answers.

I think that most of the people that you find 'mean' actually turn out to be quite pleasant and welcoming if you take the effort to do a few things to make their day a bit easier.

You know dude, you aren't helping out our community by acting like this. I've had some easy ass question thrown at me in my time. But instead of acting like a dick, I just pointed them to the docs. Alot of newbies don't know how great the handbook really is. We were all newbies once, and I highly doubt you never asked a stupid question on the mailing-lists. Instead of going off half-cocked, maybe you should think about what you're going to say. That way you won't make the rest of us FreeBSD users look bad. I don't really care if gentoo wants to make gentoo/FreeBSD. It's not going to hurt anything. Everybody should just calm down, ports isn't better than portage, FreeBSD isn't better than gentoo or vice versa. It's all a matter of taste, I like ports and FreeBSD, but that's my prerogative. The zealotry on both sides needs to stop because it doesn't help anybody.

You just made my day much better

You know "dude"... well, I guess you don't... but for all those who didn't pick up on it yet, any comments made previously were in response to people being jerks to the community. I don't expect people to have to read 400 pages of information to use a system, however the base FreeBSD handbook, all the way up to the parts on the kernel, was at last check like 20 pages. 20 Pages of triple spaced bold size 18 font. You can read it in less time than it takes to do a full install on an average computer system. O.o

That way you won't make the rest of us FreeBSD users look bad.

Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realize that everyone here was so closed minded that they would assume my saying something meant everyone who happens to pick up the OS felt the same as I did. Way to overgeneralize you bigot.

When I said "I think I speak for us all when I say 'spend the 30 seconds it takes to search the archive before you ask a stupid question'" I hardly think that was in any way injurious to the community as a whole. The rest of my calling people jerks or lazy ass zombies does not in any way reflect upon anyone else, I never made the claim that it was a commonly held belief. It is an unfortunate fact of life that 95% of people are in fact slugs that simply drain sustenance off of other people by asking the same stupid questions over and over again, most people, including myself, tend to be tolerant and point them to the archives, or, if it's a short explanation, I explain what they wanted to know with a short note that they check the archives the next time. I only make a stink out of it here because it's a public forum and maybe the retards that ask those questions will see it and think "hey, maybe I should check the archives so that guy that was yelling at everyone on OSNews doesn't reply to me with something nasty and call my genealogy into question."

Also, no, I have never in my life asked a stupid question on the mailing list that there was an answer for elsewhere, and certainly not in an archived text searchable list. If you did then you can join everyone else on my list of people I highly despise for being too lazy to press a search button. Not that you care.