On Thu, 5 Nov 2015, Jonathan Perkin wrote:
What backend does pkgin use?libfetch.
I often have problems with pkgin downloads. For some odd reason, in the middle of my downloads it often just hangs (--stalled--). It's usually when it's right in the middle of a file. I have to ctrl-c, then restart pkgin (ie.. just up-arrow and try again). It always succeeds on retry then usually stalls out again later on another file.
If I download the same files from the same place using aria2c or wget, it always works fine and if it does stall, I can reproduce the stall with any other tool to verify it's some problem with the remote site or my route there, and not simply that the tool got "tired" (sorry, don't know what else to call that) and simply stalled out for no visible reason.
I'm not saying it's specific to pkgin/libfetch, but the little evidence I've seen points that way, since other tools can grab the same list of files without stalling. It's an intermittent issue that mainly seems to happen with larger files. If it was a network/NIC issue, wouldn't the other tools exhibit the same behavior?
No, but you are welcome to wget files into the cache manually if you wish.Can we force it to use wget?
While I completely understand the desire to keep it all self-contained, I certainly wouldn't have minded if there was an option to use a different download method internal to the tool. You are right to point out that one could populate the cache, but you understand that'd require you to find the URL, manually map out the package dependencies, and download them all manually without the benefit of the tool supplying the URLs (which it certainly knows since it has to feed them to libfetch).
BTW, I hope I don't come across as complaining. I'm happy as a lark that we now have pkgin and other than this one little quirk that might be specific to my setup (or who knows maybe I'm doing something wrong), it's a pretty fantastic tool. I've had far worse experiences with the Python script that is "yum". I know folks are volunteers with the NetBSD project and I'm not trying to insult anyone's work. I'm just saying that I have seen pkgin misbehave in this one minor way.
Thanks, Swift