On Tue, Apr 24, 2001 at 06:26:11PM +0700, Robert Elz wrote:
> I understand why people would like to branck pkgsrc, and it sure would be
> truly convenient if it would work, and not cause too many headaches, but
> I doubt that it is really feasible.
> 
> It isn't the added load on the ftp servers (space load if nothing else),
> that is the problem, or any particular difficulties managing the cvs stuff.
> 
> What makes it so hard for pkgsrc is that pkgsrc refers to other people's
> code, and there's no way anyone can expect them to know that we branched
> pkgsrc on July 13 1994 and therefore whtever version of their code they
> were distributing at that date needs to be retained forever.
> 
> And without that, there's no way to maintain a stable branch as of the
> date that NetBSD-1.4 forked, or anything else, the branch would need to
> continually be updated forever - in fact, it would really just duplicate
> the head of the tree anyway (about the only difference is that it wouldn't
> get new packages added to it perhaps, which would make it less attractive,
> not more).
> 
> Certainly, simply being able to update the 1.4 binary package collection
> after someone discovers a security hole in wu-ftpd isn't going to work,
> as that's likely to depend upon a version of readline (or something) which
> is no longer available, and updating that will then require updating
> everything else which depends upon it ... just like as if it is done via
> the current pkgsrc.
> 
> kre
> 
> ps: I guess the other alternative would be for all the distfiles to be
> maintained forever by NetBSD .. and blow away all the ones where
> redistribution isn't permitted, but somehow, that doesn't sound attractive
> either.

We already keep distfiles on the ftp server, for a long time (we have 4
versions of tcsh rigth now, the older one being dated Oct 27  1996).
At last with branched pkgsrc we would know which ones we can remove :)

--
Manuel Bouyer, LIP6, Universite Paris VI.           Manuel.Bouyer@lip6.fr
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