On Mon, 1 Jul 2002, Marton Fabo wrote:

> > I've heard discussion for such a system, but I wouldn't say it's been
> > "promised".  I agree it would be nice, but its non-trivial.  Managing the
> > dependancies, especially for people tracking -current or -release, could
> > rasie a whole bunch of problems.  I hope it can be made to work though,
> > but I wouldn't hold your breath.

Sorry the attribution's lost, but syspkg is already in. It's just not on.

> Could someone explain why it would emerge such a big problem? Having the
> default stuff (sendmail, postfix, openssh etc) installed in their current
> place, but as packages, or maybe having them in a specific default-packages
> location, with LOCALBASE set to that, and having them initially recorded in
> the package database shouldn't be that hard.

Difference in formalism. pkgsrc is all about making someone else's source
work with our OS (NetBSD or Solaris/Darwin/Linux for zoularis & friends).
i.e. we work with their make infrastructure. And we do things like build
in work.XXX/distname & such. For the base OS, we have our own make
infrastructure, and we have all the source. They just are two different
ways of doing things.

There are also some other concerns w/ syspkg. Like we want all of the
stuff in /usr in seperate packages than /, so that we can support sharing
/usr over nfs.

Take care,

Bill