Excerpts from netbsd: 17-Sep-98 Re: AFS/arla Jonathan Stone@DSG.Stanf (2770)

> We thrashed out a lot of the isssues re: pkg-izing binary
> distributions once before.  There were a lot of conflicting
> requirements and opinions about:

[some points]

One more:
The pkg system does not well if parts of the filesystem
are shared among a number of machines.
Somehow the different sorts of installed files:
-shared, arch-independant
-shared, arch-dependant and
-individual
must be accounted for separately, within the corresponding
filesystem, to get this right.
Otherwise, a diskless client will eg keep claiming that it
doesn't have a compiler, even if I install one in the shared
/usr from the server.
This looks non-trivial...

For a collection of optional add-ons this shortcoming
might be acceptable. But for serious use (and users
with many diskless clients _are_ serious) the amount
of necessary manual fixing would quite outweight the
benefits. (Which are little compared to a big tarball
since the disk space is only needed once.)

best regards
Matthias