On 8/31/2012 22:30, Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
On Fri, 31 Aug 2012, Izaac wrote:All that aside: I'm no apologist for pkgsrc. I frankly think it's pretty awful and not a little embarrassing. But this isn't one of the things it gets entirely wrong.I have been studying variety package systems for over a decade on different systems and consistently keep finding that overall pkgsrc has been the best for my needs. Can you please share what is awful, embarrassing, or wrong? Let's improve it.
Pkgsrc has some warts for sure, and I'd like to see substandard packages deleted rather than following "as long as it builds I'm sure this crap will be useful to somebody" policy, but pkgsrc basically does what it was designed to do. I don't think it's awful or embarrassing.
Trying to only use pkgsrc-trunk and upgrading binary packages as you go can lead to failure. Even rolling-replace has to be restarted a lot for various reasons. So building from source from an always current trunk is a much worse experience than you'd find on FreeBSD where that's common practice. However I think the basic response is "pkgsrc wasn't designed for that" and there may be some truth to that statement.
John