Re: how to upgrade a whole machine ...

[Dennis den Brok <d.den.brok%uni-bonn.de@localhost>]

It actually *were* easy, IMHO, if only there weren't so many reasons
for the end-user to build / update packages on his own, such as
different pkg_options and obsolete / vulnerable packages in the
binary repository. It seems to me that in order to be maximally
ergonomical, there'd just have to be:

 (i) up to date binary packages;
 (ii) binary packages for different option sets.

(ii) is probably mostly a matter of sitting down and finally deciding
on the naming scheme.  (i) may be more involved as it means optimized
bulk builds. However, it has always been somewhat mysterious to me
why bulk builds are done from scratch all the time instead of simply
rebuilding updated packages. Even OpenBSD has regularly updated
binary packages of the -CURRENT ports tree, whereas NetBSD would
already greatly benefit from up to date -STABLE packages!

Also, maybe one should stop most prominently referring to pkgsrc
itself as source of third-party software in favour of the binary
repositories. How the packages are built, ultimately, should not
be the end-user's concern, should it?

--
Dennis den Brok


On 2008-05-07, Hubert Feyrer <hubert%feyrer.de@localhost> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 7 May 2008, Dieter Baron wrote:
>> : It seems to me that pkgsrc is really more of a research thing than
>> : anything that eventually will converge to a simple, powerful tool.
>>
>>  Thank you for dismissing all the hard work various people put into
>> pkgsrc to get there, and for your lack of faith in our efforts.
>
> Why? He's got a valid point.
> pkgsrc is now ... how old, and still not working?
>
> The original goal of pkgsrc was to get software available easily.
> The initial posting showed that this goal apparently is still not reached.
>
>
>   - Hubert (co-founder of pkgsrc)
>