Re: Binary packages on NetBSD: Importing pkg(8) from FreeBSD?

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

* On 2014-10-14 at 07:31 BST, Marc Balmer wrote:

> pkg(8) has been designed to be a modern binary package manager that
> can among other things properly deal with update situations,
> properly resolve dependencies and in general allows systems to be
> managed with binary packages easily.

I'd certainly welcome it as an option, competition in this space will
be good for all parties, and I look forward to evaluating the result
of your work to see if it offers any improvements over pkgin.

Be aware however that simply changing the binary package manager does
nothing to address your "properly deal with update situations"
concern.  Upgrading packages is easy, and pkgin already solves that
problem, the hard part is correctly handling per-package changes, so
that e.g. when you upgrade across branches, you don't have your
PostgreSQL and Dovecot services suddenly die because of incompatible
database format and configuration file changes in the newer versions.

If the pkg(8) format offers any features in this area it would be
great to see a proper mk/pkgformat backend for it.

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