# push for latest versions on ports tree



## chrcol (Jul 13, 2019)

I feel certain changes on the ports tree are aiming to simplify things for maintainers but over time is eroding the advantages of the ports system.  There seems to be a push e.g. to adopt rapid development model's so pushing for admins to use latest branches of software.

Examples of this are various ports sending EOL warnings when its not EOL upstream, as well as ports even been removed with a reason of it been EOL when it isnt EOL upstream.

One port maintainer replied to me he sending the EOL as a warning only but when I asked why when was 2 years left before the stated EOL upstream, he said he had no issue warning 2 years ahead of time.

Now on the bind911 port there is a change that forces the use of the bind-tools port to be mixed in with the server bind package thats installed.

I always believe the reason bind-tools existed is so those without the server package had access to the client binaries.  That was the sole reason for the package, but now the maintainer(s) looks like they want it to be used alongside the server package, the main issue with this idea been that it forces a mismatch of binaries on the server so e.g. in my case I will have 9.11 binaries for the bind server mixed in with binaries from the 9.14 bind.  The second much more minor issue is a more bloated port configuration with a needless dependency added.

I have emailed the maintainer to ask what the reason was for this change given I was unable to find a discussion on the mailing list and no reason was provided in the port changelog.  If anyone here knows of the reason for this bind change already I would appreciate been told, thanks.

For now I am patching the Makefile to remove the bind-tools dependency and so it recompiles the tools inclusive again.  Although I expect this may break things as it looks like other ports are going to have their dependencies hard set to bind-tools instead of a previous dynamic dependency.


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## chrcol (Jul 13, 2019)

Wont be patching it, I just checked the commit and its quite an amount of changes including to other port's makefiles.

Just have to hope nothing breaks with the version mismatches.


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## toorski (Jul 14, 2019)

That's why it's called FOSS-FreeOpenSourceSoftware. 
I've been re-making postgresql-* server from source to match my client, *_pdo extension versions with the server, among other things.


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