Re: building foreign packages with pkgsrc

["J. Lewis Muir" <jlmuir%imca-cat.org@localhost>]

On 06/30, Ottavio Caruso wrote:
> On Sat, 22 Jun 2019 at 21:55, Sijmen Mulder <ik%sjmulder.nl@localhost> wrote:
> >
> > I'm interested in moving things forward for providing binary packages
> > on various common distributions.
> 
> If you are going to do that, it would be nice and interesting if there
> was coordination between you and other developers who already maintain
> bootstraps for Linux (~jperkin and ~bacon are the ones I know of;
> there might be more) in order to agree on some common bootstrap flags
> and avoid duplication.

Also nice would be agreement on the prefix of the binary sets:

  jperkin@ (according to [1], [2], and [3])

    SmartOS/illumos: /opt/local
    macOS:           /opt/pkg
    Linux:           /usr/pkg

  bacon@ (according to [4] and [5])

    NetBSD 7.1.2: /sharedapps/pkg-<year>Q<quarter>
    RHEL 7:       /sharedapps/pkg-<year>Q<quarter>

Another important aspect of binary sets is whether they receive security
updates.  According to [1], [2], and [3], the jperkin@ sets receive
updates at least every few days.  According to [5], the bacon@ sets do
not.

Another important aspect of binary sets is which branch they are for.
Ideally for me, they would be for the latest stable branch.  (And I
know for many others, the ideal is for the current branch.)  I could be
wrong, but looking at [6] it seems like jperkin@ provides sets for the
latest stable branch only for SmartOS/illumos, while macOS and Linux are
on the current branch.  Looking at [7] it seems that bacon@ provides
sets for the latest stable branch and not the current branch.

And then there are the updates in pkgsrc itself.  If the latest pkgsrc
stable branch does not receive security updates, then obviously any
binary sets built from that branch won't get the security updates
either.

Lewis

[1]: http://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on-illumos/
[2]: http://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on-osx/
[3]: http://pkgsrc.joyent.com/install-on-linux/
[4]: http://mirror1.hpc.uwm.edu/
[5]: https://uwm.edu/hpc/software-management/
[6]: https://pkgsrc.joyent.com/packages/
[7]: http://mirror1.hpc.uwm.edu/pkgsrc/packages/sharedapps/