Aleksey Cheusov wrote:
That's true and it's an important technical improvement in using libfetch over a separate ftp(1) process.JIMHO using external fetching program is MUCH better than linking with any kind of libraries. IMHO using library for this kind of tasks is a very serious design BUG. This is absolutely obvious. Proxies, unusual protocols for fetching (CIFS/smbclient for example), p2p networks, etc. etc. etc.
If it's "absolutely obvious", then it's not exactly "IMHO" is it ;-)I'm willing to see incremental improvements in our package tools over time. While the current pkg_add(1) does use an external ftp(1) process to access remote repositories, there is no "pluggable" interface to let you choose a different binary to use. You can specify one at compile-time, but the binary must have the exact same interface as ftp(1). For this reason, I'm okay with using libfetch, which is essentially just an alternative ftp(1) implementation in a nicer-to-use library version.
I feel this can be revisited down the road after we have made the changes Joerg has described in his proposal, and possibly have a better idea of how to standardize the structure for remote repositories. Being able to use alternative programs, e.g. bittorrent, to grab binary packages would be something to look forward to in the future, but that is a feature that is not high priority, whereas the continuing clean-up and modernization of the pkg_install codebase is definitely a high-priority project. Making Joerg's proposed changes now will help make is easier to add new features in the future such as the one you're proposing.
Cheers,
-- Johnny C. Lam