Subject: Re: PROPOSAL: NetBSD System Packages
To: Hubert Feyrer <feyrer@rfhs8012.fh-regensburg.de>
From: Jonathan Stone <jonathan@DSG.Stanford.EDU>
List: tech-pkg
Date: 09/30/1998 16:59:11
Hubert Feyrer <feyrer@rfhs8012.fh-regensburg.de> writes:

>Well, I've made my points. My hope was to get a system out of this that
> - does scale well, even for fine granularity as we have in pkgsrc already
> - can be used for system pkgs (sets) as well as pkgsrc pkgs
>
>As this is obviously not the goal here (per your cited concensus), all
>that's left is to wish you much luck.

I think we could still do that, but it would require some changes to
the "pkg" format in order to get one format that meets the
install/sysisnt requirements. 
Unless the people who voiced those problems retract them, that is.

I also think there's a real difference between how pkgs are
maintained, and the maintenance and releae cycle for intree code.
I'm very happy to keep using
    (cd /usr/src/etc; make distribution DESTDIR=/empty/disk)
and then run makesets over /empty/disk.
I'd like to keep doing so with a makesets thats reworked from the
ground up to produce sets that're collections of pkgs.

I'm also very aware that the "base os" set is special and its just not
feasible to treat it as a "normal" pkg or meta-pkg; and that most of
the base install is in an environment where _we dont want_ to force
naive users to use the "normal" pkg tools; we want it to be easy to
use and to DTRT: curses-driven, or GUI, or whatever.

Plus the consensus from last time is that, for sysinst, "pointers" are
Right Out, copies are In, and I think that rules out using the
_normal_ pkg_ mechanism directly on a pkgset. I'd be glad to be wrong,
though.

I think we could still make pkgsets be a _super_set of the normal pkg
format. That's probably a worthwile goal and I dont see any reason not
to. And we could always extend our pkg tools, so the handle a pkgset
by just installing all the component pkgs.

I could live with that; how about you?