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

On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 1:12 PM, John Marino <netbsd%marino.st@localhost> wrote:

I've been wondering why the pkgsrc project hasn't held a "fly-off" between pkgin and nih in order to select an official package manager, and then integrate this directly into the mk/* framework such that the very first package built is this official package manager.

I think I understand why people may want to see "official package manager"

but it's not clear for me what is the purpose of "integration", especially if you say

about mk/*. Can you explain?

For pkgsrc, it seems like having an integrated binary package manager would "fix" the problems seen with the "experimental" "make replace"

It's well known that "make replace" is only for pkgsrc developers :-)

and untrustworthy pkg_rolling-replace.

pkg_rolling-replace cannot be replaced when you have no root access (shell servers)

or have several pkgsrc instances in the system. So, it is definitely useful tool.

Now, not having used either pkgin or nih, I'm only assuming one or both of them are similar to pkgng where they have their own database and internally store package metadata which is why it needs to be built first.

JGYI. nih doesn't use any db for metadata. It uses pkgdb and is based solely on pkg_install.