Re: pkgsrc status with FreeBSD

["Thomas Mueller" <mueller6725%twc.com@localhost>]

from Denis Nykula:

> Up-to-date musl distro with active support for pkgsrc bootstrap, I'd like to remind, is Oasis Linux: https://github.com/oasislinux/oasis
        
> Pkgsrc is friendlier to port than Portage because it doesn't require Python or GNU versions of system utilities, just POSIX and a downloader with https support.
  
I already found Oasis Linux.  It will require rebuilding my NetBSD system to current (9.99.72) or 9.0_STABLE because many packages are in a tangled, messy state.

I don't have ninja installed, and that is a big thing to build.

Cause is pkgchk -u gone amok, deficiencies with pkg_rolling-replace, or maybe the transition from Python 2 to Python 3 was too much for pkg_rolling-replace.

Transition from Python 2 to Python 3 made a mess of things, not limited to pkg_rolling-replace or NetBSD.

On GNU versions of system utilities, FreeBSD is getting rid of GNU versions in the base system, planned for FreeBSD 13.0.

Reason is licensing issue, but differences with GNU versions adds a layer of difficulty for cross-compiling and also for compiling many FreeBSD ports.

from Jason Bacon:

> Correct and as we discussed in another recent thread, FreeBSD is particularly
> vulnerable to leakage since the ports system installs into /usr/local by
> default and many upstream build systems have this prefix hard coded into
> search paths.  If a pkgsrc package doesn't ensure that pkgsrc $PREFIX comes
> first, this could be a problem.

I believe that is not too difficult to work around.  I know to use --prefix= when configuring a package.

> Pkgsrc works almost as well on CentOS as it does on NetBSD, with the right
> setup, and there are in fact some packages that work only on Linux.

I believe some packages working only on Linux is not due to pkgsrc; those packages are not portable to NetBSD even by other means, and may be not portable to any non-Linux in some cases.  Systemd?

> Set BATCH=yes in /etc/make.conf to turn off FreeBSD's ports dialog. You can
> also set individual port options there, though you may have to inspect the
> Makefile to figure out what variables to set.  I'm not sure if FreeBSD ports
> has anything like "make show-options".

FreeBSD has "make config-recursive".  It is possible to set port options without dialog4ports in FreeBSD, but is more complicated than with pkgsrc or Gentoo portage.

Tom