Re: NetBSD vs. FreeBSD [Was: Desktop NetBSD needs your help]

[dragvit%volny.cz@localhost]

Hello,

I thought I wouldn't participate, but this one gave me a good laugh.

> Pkgsrc is so much great, it's just an excellence. It's
> a diamond. It does anything, it have enough. Next
> week we would have to build up more than 40 Solaris
> servers, with pkgsrc it is a work for several scripts.
> Really, there is no other package system doing that.
> Using that technologies for years I don't see any
> defects in pkgsrc system.

I see a lot of them, biggest being lack of proper and _COMPLETE_ documentation.
You're right that there are many cool features in pkgsrc, but most of
them are undocumented, documented poorly or in a way that makes reading
the documentation a pain. I recently used pkgsrc on HP-UX - and while
I did manage to compile quite a lot of stuff with it, it was from "excellence"
and "doing anything".

To get most stuff working, I had to do a lot of tweeking, mostly by editing
files which IMHO only pkgsrc developers should know about. Some problems
were solved by setting various, totally obscure variables - usually
after getting a hint from people on #pkgsrc. When I asked "where can
I find documentantion on these magic flags", most of the time the answer
was "there's none". Having to dig thru tons of obscure files looking
for obscure flags isn't my idea of time-saving utility.

BTW - some stuff that compiles just fine with "./configure; make; make
install" on HP-UX is horribly broken in pkgsrc on the same platform
- feature allowing me to tell pkgsrc "it's compiled & installed elsewhere,
ignore that dependency" was something I sometimes lusted after.

I know these are not NetBSD-specific (after all, HP-UX is not the main
focus of pkgsrc), but the point about horrible documentation still holds
(because that one is valid even on NetBSD). I remember reading an interview
with one of the original pkgsrc developers - his view on pkgsrc these
days is that it is cool what i accomplished, but definitely is not the
tool he wanted to make - which was a framework for easy preparation
and installation of binary packages. Pkgsrc SUCKS in that regard, automatic
upgrades are just a dream (feature like "upgrade all my packages to
latest version" was missing for how long? maybe it's there now, I've
stopped checking long time ago). And maybe it was there all the time,
just not documented so normal user gives up long before he finds it.

You (and other people here) are right - there are some extremely cool
thing about NetBSD, simplicity being one of them. But just because something
is cool, it doesn't mean it is the only way to do it - because cool
isn't always time-saving. And time-saving is my idea of good sysadmin
tool.

Vit Herman