FreeBSD portmgr thank you to the FreeBSD Foundation

The FreeBSD Ports Management Team wrote a thank you note to the Foundation for providing travel grants to several developers who therefore were able to attend the very successful Ports Working Group session.

We would like to publicly thank the FreeBSD Foundation for granting Baptiste Daroussin and Julien Laffaye a travel grant to travel to BSDCan 2011 for the Ports and Packages Working Group held at in Ottawa last week. The working group itself was a huge success and a number of improvements with regard to automated binary package creation and distribution to ease upgrade procedures for our users were discussed and will hopefully be implemented over the next few months.

None of these improvements, however, would be possible without a long overdue rewrite of the package tools provided by FreeBSD. Over last few years, a number of attempts were made to enhance the current tools, but none have been as all-compassing as the PKGNG project by Baptiste and Julien. The presentation given by Baptiste at the packages summit and summariszed at the DevSummit track of BSDCan showed a comprehensive new tool that can completely replace the current tools, and provide a clear migration path from the old to the new tool. It also provides a large number of new features while keeping the old ones and is a lot more flexible to be able to add more features later. As you may have heard, Baptiste has also joined the ports management team as a result of his efforts.

Thanks again to the Foundation for sponsoring Baptiste, Julien, Simon Nielsen (Deputy Security Officer) and Thomas Abthorpe (Ports Management Team) who all were instrumental into making the ports working group such a success.