Why do I want to "get pkgsrc"?

[Qingyao Sun <sunqingyao19970825%icloud.com@localhost>]

Dear List,

While reading the pkgsrc user's guide, I find the chapters structured in an unnatural way. In particular, I wanted to install few packages like bash, tmux, and vim with pkgsrc, which I presume is the most common use case of a package manager. Unfamiliar with pkgsrc, I started reading the guide chapter-by-chapter. In chapter 3 [1], I was instructed to “get pkgsrc” by downloading a large tarball or checkout a huge CVS repository which contains the source of all packages. Not only is this step very time-consuming and took a lot of disk space, it is also completely unnecessary: I can simply set PKG_PATH and install individual packages with pkg_add or pkgin, which is not explained until chapter 5.

From my perspective, chapter 5 should be in the position of chapter 3, as this is what a typical user would care most. On the other hand, I don’t see the purpose of having the source of very single package in /usr/pkgsrc: I wonder why do I, as a user, ever want to do that instead of downloading packages on demand from http://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/$(uname -s)/$(uname -m)/$(uname -r|cut -f '1 2' -d.)/All?


Bests,
Qingyao


[1]: https://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/getting.html