Have you never learned to use one of the optional front ends to the ports system? I guess so.

I'll use pkgng on the rare occasion that I need something huge and ugly like OpenOffice.org, in part because that won't pull in a bunch of asinine build dependencies and in part because I don't want to wait three days for something almost as big as MS Windows that I don't want anyway except for the fact some knucklehead sent me an Excel spreadsheet. Otherwise, I like the ports system (with portmaster as the front end, these days) just fine.

That's not the fault of the ports system. That's the fault of the maintainer of that specific port.

That's kind of a strange gripe. Are you really complaining about how version numbers are represented?

It was stated that software conflicts are rare -- not that they never happen. They happen for every software management system, including those used by popular Linux distributions and what we might, with a laugh, call a software management system on MS Windows. Such is life.

Oh, and . . . portmaster has built-in facilities for the same stuff that work even better than portversion.

Regarding your only specific problem mention . . .

Do people still use pkg_version? Are you aware portversion is faster, and has been for a long time -- and pkg_* tools are reaching EOL?

Ironically, PulseAudio works better on BSD Unix systems than on Linux-based systems, generally. PulseAudio is a complete disaster area on the platform for which it was designed (Linux).

Maybe that wouldn't happen if you didn't keep trolling there with hostile claims about how awful FreeBSD is, and how unpleasant its users are.

alternative interpretation:

Woohoo! FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE comes with support for new Intel HD graphics. Hot damn. I finally get to get rid of the non-deterministic, obese, constantly agonizing experience of dicking around with half-baked bullshit in the Linux world on this laptop.

I mean, really . . . who wouldn't want to get out from under the horrid experiences Lennart Poettering, the GNU Project, and Canonical have foisted onto the Linux world in recent years?

If the driver needs to be integrated into a monolithic whole with the code that makes it compatible with something distributed under the GPL (such as the Linux kernel), there's some danger of being liable for license violation if someone wants to make a stink about it -- and it's not just the GPL that may be the problem, remember: Oracle is the owner of the ZFS copyrights, and the ZFS is distributed under the terms of a copyleft license.

How you go about getting the pieces of software to play well with each other determines the potential for being sued or otherwise having issues related to license incompatibility. The current thinking on the matter in the Linux world seems to be "Well . . . I doubt anyone will sue us for making the ZFS driver into a module. I guess we're safe. Hope so, anyway."

Some of the push to relax and just use stuff together had something to do with embarrassment over licensing conflicts with the GPL, I think -- more so than because of actual honest analysis of the GPL resulting in a feeling that it's safe to use ZFS as a distinct module.

What license do you mean? That does not describe CDDL. There are licenses with "advertising clauses" and so on with which the GPL conflicts, but that's not the reason for CDDL incompatibility.

I think you mean you wish that Wayland would grow some support for FreeBSD. It was designed in the first place with the Linux kernel assumed in its target platform, which means some changes need to be made in Wayland for smooth porting to FreeBSD. That, at least, is my understanding (I haven't actually looked at the sources for Wayland).

The licensing issue is that both CDDL (the license for ZFS) and GPL (the license for the Linux kernel) are copyleft licenses -- and they're not the same copyleft license -- so they are legally incompatible with each other. It's a common problem when copyleft licenses meet. Unless you're playing tricks with shims and wrappers, such as by running ZFS in userspace somehow, or forcing end users to do all the work of setting up ZFS rather than making it quick and easy to set up, you're probably violating the CDDL and GPL by distributing ZFS with a Linux distribution.

Do you mean you wish Linux used a more broadly compatible license than the GPL so it wouldn't have had problems figuring out how to directly support ZFS without violating either license?

Yes, portupgrade is separate from the base system, available through the ports system itself. It's only "deprecated", however, in that it used to essentially be "the standard" for ports system front ends, and has been edged out in that regard by portmaster. There are other front ends as well, though, and they're there to provide choices, as is portmaster.

We probably shouldn't trust anything anyone who says "developper" says about programming, anyway.