Re: ports

[John Marino <netbsd%marino.st@localhost>]

On 9/11/2012 10:50, Aleksej Saushev wrote:
> John Marino<netbsd%marino.st@localhost>  writes:
> > 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.


I said, "crap", not "old".  There's a difference.  I'm talking about 
substandard packages that are not generally useful and probably never 
were.  Right now a single voice can halt the removal of a package, but I 
don't think pkgsrc should be a personal repository.


> > 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.


If your position is pkgsrc is better than FreeBSD ports for rebuilding 
packages from source in place, I can not even entertain a debate on 
that.  Fine, you had a bad experience on FreeBSD ports.  Maybe you did 
something wrong.


> 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.


On FreeBSD, they don't have quarterly branches so by this definition the 
ports are always "unstable".  This should indicate FreeBSD ports are 
better suited for upgrading in place.


> 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.


I will take a look at pkg_chk.  There are several package tools I'm not 
familiar with, this is one of them.

John