Re: building foreign packages with pkgsrc

[Ottavio Caruso <ottavio2006-usenet2012%yahoo.com@localhost>]

On Sat, 22 Jun 2019 at 14:30, Brook Milligan <brook%nmsu.edu@localhost> wrote:
>
> Long ago there was a GSOC project [1] mentioned in pkgsrc-users [2] for supporting foreign package formats (e.g., FreeBSD, RPM, DPKG, etc.). It seems that pkgformat infrastructure exists in mk/pkgformat (and seems to be used for package creation) but it only supports native pkgsrc packages.
>
> Was there ever support for other formats?
>
> Is there any interest in supporting other formats?
>
> How complicated would it be to support other formats using this framework?
>
> Is there anyone who has expertise with any foreign package formats who would be willing/interested in helping to do this?
>
> Cheers,
> Brook
>
> [1] http://addpackageforma.sourceforge.net/
> [2] https://mail-index.netbsd.org/pkgsrc-users/2011/10/15/msg015192.html
>

I don't know about FreeBSD, but, as long as Linux is concerned, the
problem would be that the resulting packages would be installed in the
same binary prefix as the native distro (/bin:/sbin:/usb/bin, etc),
negating pkgsrc's intrinsic advantage of separating base system from
additional packages. But maybe I didn't get the point of this project,
in which case I apologise.

(Incidentally and perhaps unrelated, but I think a big breakthrough
for pkgsrc on Linux would be to find a mechanism to build and create
packages that could work seamlessly on heterogeneous environments such
as the gazillion different distros. )

-- 
Ottavio Caruso