June 5, 2007 at 11:07AM Upgrading to X11 7.2...
...was, without a doubt, one of the most painful experiences of my life, mainly because the FreeBSD developers decided to merge the contents of X11BASE into LOCALBASE. Don’t get me wrong, this was the right thing to do, I just wish the whole thing didn’t mean that I ended up having to recompile three quarters of the stuff on my laptop, some of it twice. Not the most pleasant way to spend a bank holiday weekend. I’m still shattered.
Maybe I should have waited till the end of the ports freeze when there’d be packages available and then have done the upgrade. God knows, there’s enough stuff in X where there’s really, really no advantage in compiling natively over installing from packages.
On a completely unrelated note, I’m going to throw a JavaScript remoting demo up later after lunch today, or possibly tomorrow morning. I just have to convert the demo page from PHP to ColdFusion so it can run here.
1 On June 5, 2007 at 16:04, Revence 27 wrote:
Heh. All along I was thinking you people used pkgsrc to take care of that stuff. I dread those corners. It’s why apt-get was invented ... :-)
2 On June 5, 2007 at 17:32, Keith wrote:
X11 7.2 is bleeding edge, that’s why it’s currently only installable from the ports: there’s no packages for it just yet. If there were, I would’ve used used them for a good chunk of it. Still, there probably will be shortly seeing as FreeBSD is going through a ports freeze to allow packages to be rebuilt.
And anyway, the upgrade had a major reorganisation of the filesystem hierarchy bundled into it, so don’t be surprised it was so awkward. I wasn’t.
3 On June 5, 2007 at 17:36, Keith wrote:
I’d also like to point out that the FreeBSD port tools are just as easy, if not easier, to used than APT. I really wish there was a usable equivalent of FreeBSD’s pkg_rmleaves port.