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

[Aleksey Cheusov <cheusov%tut.by@localhost>]

> I honestly had not heard of distbb before today.

distbb is my own bulk build tool (alternative to pbulk) just like
nih is my own binary package manager (alternative to pkgin).

Example of its output
http://mova.org/~cheusov/pub/bulk/NetBSD/i386/5.1/HEAD/logs/20130319.0807/META/report.html

> I suspect you probably misunderstood me.

I think I understand you correctly.
In short, you are looking for

   make make-me-happy

And I think this is a wrong request. pkgsrc is a low level tool. It
builds binary packages from build specification (Makefiles). No more, no
less. It can not and should not make anyone happy. For happiness there
are higher level tools like pkgin, pbulk, nih, distbb, pkg_rr etc. As I
have much longer background with Linux than with NetBSD and pkgsrc I'll
show one example from Linux world. rpmbuild(1) is a tool from rpm-based
Linux that builds packages. This is full equivalent for

   make {extract,checksum,patch,[re]build,stage-install,[re]package} \
      DEPENDS_TARGET=install-dependencies-first

And nobody even tries to adapt rpmbuild(1) to update the whole system or
rebuild all packages in the repository or checking for security updates
and so on and so forth. The same should be applied to pkgsrc.

Yes, pkgsrc infrustructure provides more features like

  make install
  make deinstall
  make ... DEPENDS_TARGET=do-bin-install

etc. rpmbuild doesn't provide something similar. But all these features
are still low level build and installation mechanisms.  As I already
said I'd recomment end users to not use "make anything" at all. Of
course, this is my own opinion. I'd prefer to see pkgsrc as simple as it
is possible (right now it is extreamly big complex).

> Pkgsrc makes one jump through absurd hoops when building from source
> over a long period of time where the branch gets updated.

pkg_rr have one very serious problem, see my answer to Greg.
It can/should be fixed. Other options are distbb/pbulk + nih/pkgin.

> pkgin and nih: useless if there are no available binary packages prebuilt
> distbb: I infer it's not a level for the non-developer yet
> pbulk:  I *know* it's not a level of the non-developer yet

As I said I'll work on distbb. Currently its configuration is not as
easy as it could be.

> So you're basically saying: DragonFly users should be given a set of
> prebuilt binaries for quarterlies,

Definitely! And this is your (dfly developers') task.  Quarterly binary
packages and timely security updates (for base system and pkgsrc
packages) is what may increase DragonFly's userbase. The same for NetBSD.

> and not build from source because pkgsrc itself is too low level for
> the basic user.  This issue is that this is a essentially correct
> assessment.

I'd recommend those who want to build their own binary packages to use
either pbulk or distbb and then use normal binary packages managers.

-- 
Best regards, Aleksey Cheusov.