On 4/16/2013 13:11, Jonathan Perkin wrote:
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.
The situation for FreeBSD is different. "pkg" is used during the packaging of the software too. It's building up the repository database that will later be downloaded by another instance of pkg from any user that wants to install packages from that repository. Now it's perfectly possible that I'm comparing apples to oranges here because I don't understand exactly how these two managers work.
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.
Again I may be mixing apples and oranges. For FreeBSD, the "pkg" users don't have *any* pkg_* tools. Pkg is one command that covers all this functionality, so there's nobody that "doesn't want it" as it is required for any package manipulation. And it works betters for installs, information, upgrades, "which", etc, etc. I don't see people returning to pkg_* after using pkg.
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.
1. I think this is an orthogonal issue.2. Personally I'll probably starting working on some of related issues because I'd like to use pkgsrc on OmniOS and bootstrapping is as obnoxious there as it was for OpenIndiana (e.g. gcc 4.6 has to be installed from another source first among other issues).
John