Re: suggestion: Host fly-off between pkgin and nih and subsequent official integration

[Jonathan Perkin <jperkin%joyent.com@localhost>]

* On 2013-04-16 at 14:21 BST, John Marino wrote:

> On 4/16/2013 15:10, Jonathan Perkin wrote:
> >pkgin has no benefit to users who build from source, no.  It is for
> >users who wish to only use binary packages that they have built
> >themselves or are provided by a third party.
> 
> Hmm, I'm sorry for derailing (temporarily) my own thread, but in the
> context that pkgin/nih was designed for, pure binary package mgmt,
> how well do they handle switching repos?
> 
> For example, say I have a system populated with 2012Q4 packages.  If
> I point pkgin (for example) at a 2013Q1 repositority, will it
> seamlessly be able to graft in new packages from 2013Q1 even though
> dependency versions might be different?

Mostly, yes.  Any dependency issues are problems that need to be fixed
in pkgsrc anyway and are independent of the chosen upgrade tool.
Package renames are another cause of potential problems.

We have some users who do this, and encourage them to report issues
with this method so that we can fix the bugs in pkgsrc if necessary.

> Or are you pretty much resigned to desinstalling everything and
> reinstalling their counterparts from the new repository?

In SmartOS land we provide new images every quarter containing the
latest pkgsrc branch, so we always recommend that users simply
re-provision on top of a new virtual machine as it avoids any
potential upgrade issues, but if you are careful then there's no
reason the upgrade path shouldn't work, except for cases where e.g.
packages have introduced backwards-incompatible configuration changes
which pkgsrc simply ignores and leaves to the user to fix.

-- 
Jonathan Perkin  -  Joyent, Inc.  -  www.joyent.com