Re: Removing pkgviews?

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

* On 2014-10-02 at 10:37 BST, Thomas Klausner wrote:

> There was an interesting research project called pkgviews which aimed
> at allowing parallel installation of multiple versions of packages.
> 
> I think Stoned Elipot and Alistair Crooks spent a lot of them and
> effort on it, but it was never extended to cover even most of pkgsrc,
> and noone has been working on it for years AFAICT.
> 
> It still has some hooks in the pkgsrc framework and in some packages
> (PKG_INSTALLATION_TYPES).
> 
> I wonder if it's time to remove it.

I'd be in favour of this.  It would clean up and simplify the
infrastructure, hopefully making it easier for people to understand
what's going on, which may in turn lead to further improvements.

As it happens, today I've been working on further performance
improvements to the 'wrapper' phase, and BUILDLINK_IS_DEPOT is
preventing us from implementing another set of speedups.

It was a good idea (I came to pkgsrc from encap which did something
similar), but I haven't used it for 10 years and I'm not sure there
are any users left other than agc?

It would be useful to know its status, what works, what doesn't, how
much work would be involved to give it 100% coverage, etc.

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