Re: suggestion: Host fly-off between pkgin and nih and subsequent official integration

[Jonathan Perkin <jperkin%joyent.com@localhost>]

* On 2013-04-16 at 11:12 BST, John Marino wrote:

> I've been wondering why the pkgsrc project hasn't held a "fly-off"
> between pkgin and nih in order to select an official package
> manager, and then integrate this directly into the mk/* framework
> such that the very first package built is this official package
> manager.
> 
> [..]
>
> In the same vein, pkgsrc should evaluate these candidate
> binary package managers and integrate one of them rather than stick
> with "choice is good", especially when the default choice is "no
> manager.

Binary package managers are only useful when there are binary packages
available to install.  Simply building and installing pkgin by default
won't really help matters, the real work is to ensure that users have
repositories available of up-to-date packages ready to install.

This is what we do in SmartOS land, and we actually have the opposite
problem - all our users know pkgin and how to install and upgrade from
our binary package repositories, but they know very little about pkg_*
and building packages from source.

In short, this is a distribution problem.  Building pkgin by default
will just annoy pkgsrc users who do not want it, and will be
irrelevant for users such as ourselves who already build and package
it up for end users to enjoy.

I'd rather see effort put into more bulk builds and distributing
bootstrap packages which include a configured and ready to use pkgin
install, as we do for SmartOS/illumos and OSX.

-- 
Jonathan Perkin  -  Joyent, Inc.  -  www.joyent.com