Re: Pkgsrc on linux, defective by design ?

[Youssef Ghorbal <djo%pasteur.fr@localhost>]

>> Out of total curiosity (and I know I shouldn't be asking this but
>> anyhow) WHY are you trying to use PKGSRC on CentOS?
>>    There is little sense to be made of that.
> 
> We use RHEL and/or CentOS at $DAYJOB.  We need a set of up to date
> software packages, compiled in the way that we want.

And we want to have in some cases different "major" releases of the same 
"software". Specially Python and PHP. Pkgsrc keeps seperate ports for some of 
these software which is nice.

>> CentOS by choice ships older (known stable and secure) code and PKGSRC
>> by comparisson (in many cases not all) ships newer releases. There are
>> conflicting ideals at work here and you will have issues as a result.
> 
> The pkgsrc installed packages can live side by side with those installed
> by yum without any issues that I have encountered.  Can you be more
> specific?

The only issue is what I mentioned with libraries linking. But I think it's 
easely workaroundable.

>> And to add to it.... almost anything you could possibly need you will
>> find in a binary form compiled for CentOS/RHEL/OracleEL in a repo.
>> thats what the package manager is there for and in any case you can
>> quite easily build RPMs against CentOS and host you're own repo quite
>> easily.
> 
> Your ability to understand my needs without me telling them to you is
> quite impressive.  I also observe that it's much nicer to compile
> packages from source using pkgsrc than any other system I have used, and
> I particularly don't agree that one can "easily build RPMs".

Sometimes, these RPMs are personal efforts hosted in personal web pages with no 
"updates". You can find version X but rarely the X+1. Not to mention the right 
version for your architecture and dependecies hell.

>> What is it that you are trying to accomplish?
> 
> I want to use pkgsrc on CentOS / RHEL because I like pkgsrc's feature
> set compared with the alternatives.

I want to have a software collection, easely upgradable and customisable. 
In term of process (when you have a lot of different OSs on diffrent 
architectures) it's far more easy to say : "Folks, all packages you need are in 
/opt/pkgsrc" whether you are in Linux, Solaris or NetBSD

Youssef Ghorbal