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Re: proposal to make bootstrap on Linux prefer pkgsrc by default.



On 2020-08-13 17:11, J. Lewis Muir wrote:
On 08/13, Greg Troxel wrote:
Jason Bacon <outpaddling%yahoo.com@localhost> writes:

On 2020-08-10 11:44, Greg Troxel wrote:
So far, we have had discussion that supports changing it on Linux.
Specific othesr, not so much, and "all others", not at all.  So I'd
prefer to just change it on Linux where we have a good basis to believe
that's in the interest of someone who doesn't understand this issue and
runs bootstrap.
I think the same reasoning would apply to Dragonfly BSD, FreeBSD,
OpenBSD, or any other platform where pkgsrc would be used alongside a
native package manager.
Maybe, maybe not.  BSD systems don't have such a reputation for ABI
instability within a stable branch.
I don't think RHEL has a reputation for ABI instability; it is quite
stable.  In fact, it seems so stable that you could even call it *stale*
at some point since each major version of RHEL is supported for *ten*
years, and I think Jason said that a problem he's come across with RHEL
is that the system programs and libraries can end up being too old for
pkgsrc.  Anyway, this is just to say that I don't understand how ABI
stability can be a differentiating factor when evaluating BSD systems if
the consensus is that RHEL should default to prefer pkgsrc; there must
be some other factor at play.

Lewis
That's correct, RHEL ABI is all but frozen for all Yum packages through a major OS version.  They take great care to maintain binary compatibility until EOL.  Even minor version changes in a Yum package are fairly rare.  Instead, they back-port a lot of security and bug fixes.  Bleeding edge Linux distros are another story, like non-LTS (long-term support) Ubuntu.

With the BSD systems, I'm not concerned about the base changing, but leakage from the native package manager.  FreeBSD ports are a special concern since they install into /usr/local by default and many upstream build systems have this prefix hard-coded into their lib/header search path.  I think if a pkgsrc package latched onto something from /usr/local/lib instead of the proper builtin from /usr/lib, this would technically be a bug in the package, but I suspect that many such issues go undetected since most pkgsrc developers don't work on systems with heavily populated /usr/local trees.

Yum installs all packages directly under /usr, BTW, so essentially anything from Yum is part of the "base" from our perspective. Problematic when you consider that most Yum packages are optional and could be removed at any time.

I'm not too concerned about changing the default for BSDs, just raising the issue for future discussion.

    JB



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