Re: Making it easier to get and use pkgsrc

[David Holland <dholland-pkgtech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Sat, Dec 11, 2010 at 08:14:26PM +0000, David Brownlee wrote:
 > It has been suggested that we should make it easier for users to
 > download and start using pkgsrc.
 > [snip]

All this discussion seems futile and rather silly, because it seems
fairly obvious that the correct approach is to have sysinst offer to
download and unpack /usr/pkgsrc, either stable or HEAD as desired.

This should be straightforward, really.

 > - Default to DEPENDS_TARGET=package-install and
 > UPDATE_TARGET=package-install

as pointed out already, this is wrong. (and we can't switch to
USE_DESTDIR by default, btw, until someone fixes undo-replace. See PR
43689.)

 > - Move PKG_DBDIR under PREFIX

This is a bad idea. As I've said before, PKG_DBDIR contains exactly
the sort of data that is supposed to live in /var: mutable indexes and
databases that reflect the state of the system.

Surely you don't also think it would be a good idea to move the
comparable base-system data from /var to /usr? (e.g., the locate
database, services.db, /var/db/obsolete, and so forth.)

 > - Switch from mk.conf to pkgsrc.conf

I'm not sure this is a good idea. On the one hand, it avoids needing
the magic knowledge that pkgsrc is make-based; on the other hand, you
have to know that to do anything with pkgsrc. I think if we're going
to move to something that advertises itself specifically as pkgsrc
configuration that it should be restricted to configuration statements
that make sense for pkgsrc and not necessarily be an arbitrary make
fragment... but that would cause regressions if we aren't careful.

However, I do tend to think that things should be self-contained and
that the *base system*'s build should use $(TOP)/mk.conf (or maybe
$(TOP)/config.mk, but within the tree) rather than a file in /etc.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost