Re: ports

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

  Hello,

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

> 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.

I don't quite understand what you're talking about here. There's a lot
of software that is "not generally useful and probably never were."
The problem is that you don't know whether there existed active users or
not, and you still don't know whether they exist or not.

>>> 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.

I doubt that. Anyway, I don't want to discuss FreeBSD ports, it is
software that is, in my opinion, "substandard and not generally useful."
Ever since I've learnt about pkgsrc I used it on FreeBSD whenever
I could. (And when I couldn't I had enough chances to learn how ports
compare to pkgsrc in an unfavourable way.)

>> 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.

I haven't seen anything in FreeBSD ports that does help upgrading in place.
As it was discussed at recent Russian FreeBSD "mini-summit" in Moscow
I haven't heard anything (from FreeBSD developers) that anything changed,
instead I've heard that all (or almost all) problems that existed five
to seven years ago still existed a year ago.

All my experience with ports was that it _always_ was harder than pkgsrc,
whether you knew internal machinery or not.


-- 
HE CE3OH...