On Wed, 23 May 2001, John Franklin wrote:
> On Wed, May 23, 2001 at 07:38:52PM -0500, Frederick Bruckman wrote:
> > On Wed, 23 May 2001, John Franklin wrote:
> > > On Wed, May 23, 2001 at 06:13:54PM -0500, Frederick Bruckman wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Overwriting the base system files is nasty, because it makes your
> > > > configuration really hard to reproduce after a system upgrade. (Been
> > > > there!)

> > Uh, if you can use cvs, why aren't you tracking the release branch?

> In answer to your question, I'm not tracking the release branch for
> two primary reasons:
>
> 1. I don't want to dedicate the amount of drive space needed to keep
> the entire source tree online on a production box.

You can checkout, for example only "dist/bind" and "usr.sbin/bind",
and "make dependall && make install" in "usr.sbin/bind". It's not much
more difficult than pkgsrc, and, you'd be installing that into the
base system which was intended to go into the base system.

> 2. Between 1.5.0 and 1.5.1 we go though 1.5.1ALPHA and 1.5.1BETA,
> neither of which I want to upgrade to, certainly not on a daily or
> weekly basis.  If I'm on a slower box, I don't want to spend upwards
> of a week rebuilding everything.  If I'm on a production box, I
> don't want to add to it's workload by rebuilding the entire system.

That's silly. What _production_ _system_ would take a week to rebuild
NetBSD? My 840AV takes about 25 hours, and it's no screamer. The
AMD-K6 takes only a few hours. Besides, binary snapshots are available
for those who don't want to build.

> Sure, I could rebuild parts of the system, but I might miss something
> whereas pkgsrc would Do The Right Thing.

[comparisons with MS Windows and Red Hat snipped]

> NetBSD is a powerful system.  Don't hamstring it by making it difficult
> to keep it current and secure.  Pkgsrc consumes far less space than the
> entire source tree, it would take less time to rebuild a package than
> the system, and if network-based binary packages are used, it would be
> zero drive space, minimal time and high confidence.

I think what you're really asking for is a pkgized base system. As
envisioned, you would use the base sources to create proper packages
that can be manipulated with the pkg_* tools. "pkgsrc" has no role in
this. Think about it.

What I thought we were talking about, is the idea that "pkgsrc" is
supposed to fully support overwriting system binaries. Of course you
can do that, by setting "LOCALBASE" to "" before building, if you want
to deal with the mess. The acknowledged fact that it is a mess, is
exactly why we say it's "not supported".

"pkgsrc" is intended to be a supplement to the core system, not a
replacement for it.


Frederick