On Thu, 28 Jan 1999, Todd Vierling wrote:
   > It would probably be a good idea to have the "pkgsrc infrastructure"
   > available as its own tarball, i.e. contain:
   > 
   > pkgsrc/mk/*
   > pkgsrc/pkgtools/*
   > 
   > This way you would conceivably be able to update one pkg at a time if so
   > desired.

   I'd prefer to not see this happen, as it makes it easier for people to
   only partly update their pkgsrc, and exp. if they only contain the
   packages and not mk and/or pkgtools, they will miss the whole point why we
   included exactly these two in pkgsrc, and didn't leave them in the main
   distribution. 

I would really like to see a separate tarball or sup package for the
infrastructure.  It would help with the following scenario.  I use one
machine to build packages (including home-grown ones).  Then I
transfer them to others and install them.  This requires keeping the
pkg_* tools up to date on the other machines that don't have pkgsrc,
but this is a pain as it stands.  I'd prefer to keep just this subset
of pkgsrc on all my machines so I can easily transfer and install
binary packages.

Yes, it raises the possibility of portions of the pkgsrc tree being
incompatible, but I see two different uses of the tree:

- complete tree for compiling individual or all packages

- only infrastructure subtree for installing binary packages from
  other sources 

It is the latter use that is hard to do now.

Cheers,
Brook