Re: CVS commit: pkgsrc/shells/standalone-tcsh

[Jonathan Perkin <jperkin%joyent.com@localhost>]

* On 2016-09-12 at 18:01 BST, Alistair Crooks wrote:

> Well, strongly recommend away, but pkgsrc was not designed for the people
> doing bulk builds, but rather for users. Nor should it ever be anything
> other than for those same users.
> 
> If pkgsrc becomes a place where only people with access to large company
> cloud deployments, or huge bulky machines, are happy, then I think we have
> a serious problem. Analogous to Linux being taken over by the corporate
> suits wanting to stress the number of lines of code they contribute. I
> really don't want to go there.

I agree that we'll probably need to agree to disagree, but I strongly
reject the notion that bulk builds are only for large companies.
Whether it was with the old mk/bulk code or now with pbulk, and
regardless of whether it was for production use or simply for my
personal desktop, and irrespective of whether it was on a crappy Sun
Ultra 10 or across multiple fast systems, I have for over a decade
built my packages with bulk build code inside chroots, for a single
package or 100 (via limited_list or *_SPECIFIC_PKGS) or all 17,000 of
them.

To me it's the only way to ensure consistency and avoid issues while
trying to perform a live upgrade, and I simply don't trust pkgsrc to
do it right otherwise.  Yes I will concede that these things _should_
be handled by pkgsrc without the need for special environments, but we
are a long way from that and until we are then I'd really rather we
didn't see bulk builds as only for people with huge systems.  You can
run them on anything and everything (and Sevan probably has!)

I've tried to explain the benefits of doing it this way for a long
time, as well as providing docs and infrastructure to make it simpler
for folks to get started, so I guess I've failed pretty badly at doing
so if people still see it only as being for an exclusive club rather
than being something you can run every single day on crappy hardware.

-- 
Jonathan Perkin  -  Joyent, Inc.  -  www.joyent.com