Re: ports

[Aleksej Saushev <asau%inbox.ru@localhost>]

John Marino <netbsd%marino.st@localhost> writes:

> 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.

I strongly oppose this boyscoutish "delete anything that causes problems
to (one or few) developers" attitude. People use computers to do their work,
not because they want to use computers. Sometimes users prefer using old
software that is well-known to them rather than invest time into something new.

> 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.

My experience with FreeBSD ports is exactly the opposite.

In any case, anyone using non-stable branch should be prepared to deal
with problems. This is generic requirement, it doesn't apply to pkgsrc
or NetBSD only.

As for pkg_rolling-replace, I tried it several times, and found it
rather unstable way to update installed software. If there's someone who
has got satisfactory results, I would like to hear how they accomplished that.
Personally, I'm not prepared to use pkg_rolling-replace for production,
I advise using pkg_chk instead.


-- 
HE CE3OH...