Re: Making it easier to get and use pkgsrc

[David Holland <dholland-pkgtech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 05:46:58AM +0300, Aleksej Saushev wrote:
 > >  > - Move PKG_DBDIR under PREFIX
 > >
 > > This is a bad idea. As I've said before, PKG_DBDIR contains exactly
 > > the sort of data that is supposed to live in /var: mutable indexes and
 > > databases that reflect the state of the system.
 > >
 > > Surely you don't also think it would be a good idea to move the
 > > comparable base-system data from /var to /usr? (e.g., the locate
 > > database, services.db, /var/db/obsolete, and so forth.)
 > 
 > I disagree. There's 1-1 relationship between PKG_DBDIR and LOCALBASE,
 > if you have several pkgsrc deployments (some do utilise this in complex
 > administrative schemes), then you have to watch not only for
 > subdirectories in /usr, but also for subdirectories in /var.

You do anyway, unless you want the deployments to share the other
parts of /var that are used by pkgsrc, which seems like a dubious
idea. For this kind of installation it seems like you'd want to make
everything self-contained by putting VARBASE under LOCALBASE. (I don't
remember if PKG_DBDIR also needs to be set explicitly or not, but
that's a minor detail.)

However, I don't think this should be the default.

 > Using /var for _really_ variable data would be more helpful.
 > Good example for these data is PostgreSQL database, which is created
 > by strange decision under PREFIX by default: PGHOME?=${PREFIX}/${PGUSER}
 > (see postgresql*-server/Makefile). Note, that there's usually only one
 > PostgreSQL server running, if you want to run more servers, you have to
 > tune them anyway (PostgreSQL creates socket in /tmp).

Yes, that's definitely wrong.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost