On 12/4/2012 16:42, Martin wrote:
Don't get me wrong, i am not criticising pkgsrc or intentionally trying get people offside. So aside from the obvious differences and limitations (i.e. manpower, design of each BSD system) What is stopping per say DragonflyBSD or any other BSD from using packages from FreeBSD or vice versa through pkgsrc? Or is it simply that some choose not to provide back to pkgsrc?
Recent work by myself has proven that it is feasible for DragonFly to use FreeBSD ports collection with an specialized overlay. So there's nothing technically stopping that from happening.
Pkgsrc has a goal to be universal, so theoretically all platforms will benefit from contributing because the committer is ideally conscious that multiple platforms use it while FreeBSD ports committers only concern themselves with making the port work on FreeBSD.
While pkgsrc supports FreeBSD and OpenBSD, in practice it seems most users of those systems tend to stick with FreeBSD Ports Collection and OpenBSD package system. You can speculate why that is. It takes a ton of work to keep a platform current on pkgsrc (which is why I used the words "theoretically" and "ideally") so somebody from those systems has to do that work, which means they have to consider that work worthwhile. I don't see activity to that effect.
Pkgsrc would be happy to have parties from FreeBSD and OpenBSD improve the quality of the packages in the repository, I am quite sure of that. Somebody just needs to donate that energy.
John