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HEADS UP: gettext port update on FreeBSD
Dan writes "FreeBSD's Joe Marcus Clarke has committed an update to the gettext port to 0.12.1 on FreeBSD. GNU `gettext' is an important step for the GNU Translation Project, as it is an asset on which we may build many other steps. This package offers to programmers, translators, and even users, a well integrated set of tools and documentation. Specifically, the GNU `gettext' utilities are a set of tools that provides a framework to help other GNU packages produce multi-lingual messages."
I don't get it. Why is this an important step ? What did FreeBSD have before this ? Has it been _that_ long since a BSD story on slashdot , so someone just throws out the latest mail from one of the mailing lists ?
It is _recommended_ people install sysutils/portupgrade then do:
portupgrade -rf gettext -m BATCH=yes
to upgrade gettext and all of the ports that depend on it. However, if
you use portupgrade to preserve old shared libraries (i.e. you do not
run portupgrade -u), then you do not _have_ to do the full recursive
update. However, you may run into problems later on if you hold off on
doing this.
Gettext is an important piece of software. So are the 137 other projects by GNU including GCC. Each project sees many minor version releases and many major number releases. Each project is used for many operating systems.
I kind of understood the importance of GCC 3.0. This article however completely fails to explain why one particular project's one particular minor number on one particular OS stands out of the million or so permutations of these.
Original poster please enlighten us.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
1) neither the article nor the story tell you why you should upgrade, or care at all for that matter. I actually downloaded gettext, looked at the changelog; a very cursory glance makes it seem to be build and packaging changes, and a couple new platforms.
2) gettext() works by you sending it a message, usually english, and it returning that phrase translated to your natural language. If it can't find one, it returns the original text. Since the text is usually english, and I is uh nativ English speeker, this doesn't seem that critical for me.
Comments?
There are 9000 ports in the FreeBSD ports system. Why post an article on gettext? Why not post articles on p5-X11-IdleTime 0.01 (8/25/2003 10:49)? At least it's a NEW port, not not just a minor release of something that's been in the ports tree for years.
It isn't just because it's a slow news day. There was an announcement this morning that Sun FINALLY approved the distribution of Java binaries for FreeBSD.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
It's relevance to FreeBSD seems minor, however, I counted four capitalised "gnu"s. Is this some sort of subliminal gnucampaign?
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0
Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.
Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.
These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.
As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.
Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.
The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become heavily bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.
In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even Emacs Lite is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various BSD machines, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a BSD box that has run faster than its Windows counterpart, despite the BSD machine's faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 800 mhz machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that BSD is a "superior" machine.
BSD addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a BSD over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
The package system should be "stable". See what RedHat or Debian do. Once the distribution has been released, all packages that come with it are -frozen- too. They even usually merge the security updates and bug fixes by patching the same versions of packages that were originally released with the distribution instead of bumping their versions. This way there is less impact on the users. It is rarely required to update anything else when something like gettext update is released (because if they do release an update, it's going to be the idential version with minor patches applied)
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of BSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major marketing surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is extremely sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among hobbyist dilettante dabblers. In truth, for all practical purposes *BSD is already dead. It is a dead man walking.
You know, they are really scraping the bottom of the barrel to come up with BSD stories. I don't think there as been a real news item in the BSD section for months.
I'm sure that post will be super unpopular on /., but it's true. Goodness sakes, GNU isn't the greatest thing ever. There's nothing wrong with paying for software, and it's worth it a lot of times.
Maybe it's nice to just play with free software all the time. I'm in the real world though, and try to be productive.