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

[John Marino <netbsd%marino.st@localhost>]

On 4/16/2013 20:58, Aleksey Cheusov wrote:
> > This is really the crux of the issue.  1) the chroot and pbulk
> > building is incredibly cumbersome to set up and the documentation
> > seems to be outdated on top and
>
> Ask Joerg to update documentation and simplify configuring or try distbb.
> Maybe you'll find it easier :-) Seriously, in nearest future I'll
> implement support for automatic "buildbox" (chroot) creation in distbb
> as pkg_comp did many years ago. And I hope, distbb will become much
> easier to use. So, this is known and well understood problem.

I honestly had not heard of distbb before today.  I have been thinking 
that pkgsrc doesn't know what it's missing by not having poudriere (and 
it doesn't) but it seems like distbb is a similar idea.  These tool have 
to be much easier to use otherwise it will stay in the realm of the 
developer and not the regular user.

> This is not a problem of users. This is a problem of choice.  If someone
> wants to use pkg_rr or 'make replace' and feels comfortable with them, I
> cannot stop them. Nobody can. This is their choice. I'm pretty sure I
> can build and install everything I need with a help of distbb+nih
> without problems you mentioned. So, your examples seem to me irrelevant.

I suspect you probably misunderstood me.  Pkgsrc makes one jump through 
absurd hoops when building from source over a long period of time where 
the branch gets updated.  This is not a problem for FreeBSD ports, yet 
users are told that these updating issues are caused by users "misusing" 
pkgsrc.  Nobody "wants" to use rolling replace, they are forced to. 
Nobody "wants" to use "make replace", they are forced to.

> pkgsrc provides low level functionality for building and updating
> packages. Unless you are expert in pkgsrc, I'd recommend not to use it
> directly. That is, forget about "make install", "make replace" and so
> on. Don't blame low level tools, use higher level ones instead: distbb,
> pkgin, pbulk, nih etc.

pkgin and nih: useless if there are no available binary packages prebuilt
distbb: I infer it's not a level for the non-developer yet
pbulk:  I *know* it's not a level of the non-developer yet

So you're basically saying: DragonFly users should be given a set of 
prebuilt binaries for quarterlies, and not build from source because 
pkgsrc itself is too low level for the basic user.  This issue is that 
this is a essentially correct assessment.

John