On 2019-04-20 03:01, Ottavio Caruso wrote:
I use pkgsrc mainly on RHEL/CentOS Linux, which is aging/obsolete by design for the sake of long-term binary compatibility and reliability. It's based on a snapshot of Fedora that's already a couple years old by the time the RHEL derivative is released and never gets major upgrades to anything over its 7-or-so year support cycle.I fiddled with pkgsrc on Linux a couple of years ago, but I had to give up because I didn't have much time and I wanted an usable system to start using right away. That "usable system" was Linux Mint Debian Edition v2 (Mate) which now is almost obsolete. I have a few packages that I'd like to install but they are not being maintained for Debian Jessie. Rather than making a new clean install with a new distro that might or might not work with my old-ish Thinkpad, I was thinking of giving pkgsrc another go. I was only wondering: at one point I will have obsolete libraries, kernel modules, firmware, etc. Would that give any trouble to the pkgsrc subsystem on my installation? Thanks -- Ottavio Caruso
To get around the age of the base tools, I rig pkgsrc to use one of its own gcc packages to build everything except gcc and its dependencies.
My auto-pkgsrc-setup script will help you easily install a tree using a pkgsrc gcc:
http://netbsd.org/~bacon/Just run it, answer the questions, and then look at your mk.conf to see how it configured the pkgsrc tree. You can tweak mk.conf after-the-fact as well.
That said, I wouldn't recommend running any Linux distribution that is no longer receiving security updates. Enterprise Linux systems are based on outdated tools, but they are maintained with regular bug fixes and security patches. It sounds like you're near/at the end of the life cycle for your Mint system, so your time might be better spend rebuilding the server on a current platform.
Good luck, JB