Re: Why do I want to "get pkgsrc"?

[Qingyao Sun <sunqingyao19970825%icloud.com@localhost>]

Thanks for your and everyone else’s reply!

> On Mar 2, 2023, at 07:06, Chavdar Ivanov <ci4ic4%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 2 Mar 2023 at 06:50, Qingyao Sun <sunqingyao19970825%icloud.com@localhost> wrote:
>> 
>> Dear List,
>> 
>> While reading the pkgsrc user's guide, I find the chapters structured in an unnatural way. In particular, I wanted to install few packages like bash, tmux, and vim with pkgsrc, which I presume is the most common use case of a package manager. Unfamiliar with pkgsrc, I started reading the guide chapter-by-chapter. In chapter 3 [1], I was instructed to “get pkgsrc” by downloading a large tarball or checkout a huge CVS repository which contains the source of all packages. Not only is this step very time-consuming and took a lot of disk space, it is also completely unnecessary: I can simply set PKG_PATH and install individual packages with pkg_add or pkgin, which is not explained until chapter 5.
> 
> The pkgsrc manual - in my view - is not intended to be a first point
> of contact for the user. I have no opinion about the chapter sequences
> - I have never read them in sequence. It contains somewhat detailed
> information about the use and the development of the pkgsrc concept.
> The compressed tarball is some 72mb (48mb in .xz compression), hardly
> a big download. It does not contain any software sources, just the
> descriptions of the package builds. The sources are downloaded as and
> when needed. It is true that building from source requires beefier
> hardware, though - there exist packages requiring many gigabytes of
> memory to be able to build (lang/zig for example).

I did an CVS download, and the /usr/pkgsrc directory takes 762M, which is roughly as large as the base system. Didn’t know the tarballs only contain a description of packages instead of the entire source tree though.

> 
> Binary pkg usage - pkgin - is one of the first capabilities to notice
> when installing a NetBSD system - it is offered in the configuration
> menu, it sets the necessary repositories.conf details and lets you
> start using pkgin from the beginning.

Ah I didn’t realize it is offered in the configuration menu during system installation! There was an entry named “Enable install of binary packages” whose value defaults to “install”, which I thought means “Put something like allow_binary=True in the pkgsrc configuration file”, but apparently it means “bootstrap pkgin”. In other words, I thought configuration menus are for toggling options, not for executing an immediate action.

> You obviously do not have to
> install pkgsrc if you are satisfied with the versions and the
> availability of the packages offered by the Foundation - or by others
> contributing to pkgsrc, e.g. Joyent. However, these binary packages
> are usually tied to a particular NetBSD (or other OS) version,
> architecture etc. and are not always suitable. On top of that, when
> these packages were built, all their possible build options have been
> taken by whoever built them, and these may not be what one wants or
> needs. I myself always use -current, so I maintain my own local pkgin
> repository which I use for the various NetBSD machines I deploy, I
> point them to it during installation. I also use pkgsrc-current and
> wip, so my NetBSD usage is a cadence of sysbuild/sysupgrade, followed
> of cvs update of the pjgsrc tree and git pull of the wip tree,
> followed by a pkg_rolling-replace, usually on weekly/bi-weekly basis.
> The client machines are then upgraded with pkgin.

I see. It makes sense that many people want to build packages from source. However, why does that require downloading the entire package repository? In other words, I wonder if it is possible to have something similar to pkgin but for installing from source, probably named srcin. Basically it will fetch the source of target and dependency packages and build everything on my machine. I mean it’s not like I need the source code of lang/zig to install editors/vim anyway.

> 
>> 
>> From my perspective, chapter 5 should be in the position of chapter 3, as this is what a typical user would care most. On the other hand, I don’t see the purpose of having the source of very single package in /usr/pkgsrc: I wonder why do I, as a user, ever want to do that instead of downloading packages on demand from http://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/$(uname -s)/$(uname -m)/$(uname -r|cut -f '1 2' -d.)/All?
>> 
> 
> Perhaps one should advertise better http://new.pkgsrc.org/ - I also
> just saw it myself, it is in my view the first thing one should see
> about pkgsrc/pkgin.

Totally agree!

> 
>> 
>> Bests,
>> Qingyao
>> 
>> 
>> [1]: https://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/getting.html
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Chavdar
> 
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> ----