On Mon, 26 Jul 2004, Greg Troxel wrote:

> I feel like I must be missing something, because using pkg_chk to
> manage centrally-built packages in a world without installed pkgsrc
> seems like an obvious application, and it's clearly 99% of the way
> there.

We need a database containing the various meta data and information of
each package. Such as apt-get's "Available" files or Yum's numerous
specifications. A few months ago, I started building a single file
containing meta data for thousands of packages, but it was quite slow.

There are some messages about this at various times in tech-pkg archives.

I think we need to add a switch to pkg_info or pkg_admin to generate the
file or to output the data in the correct format. The way I was doing it
was to run pkg_info a few times with different switches and then parsing
out the data to generate new file.

The single file could be used with package tools to know what needs to be
updated and how to update (what dependencies, what order, et cetera).

I do have systems where I don't have any pkgsrc; but I use binary packages
fetched and installed using some simple scripts.

By the way, the main problem that hits me is open-ended dependencies,
especially perl. Using a mix and match of perl 5.6 and perl 5.8 is
possible with our current system -- and that breaks things.

 Jeremy C. Reed

 	  	 	 open source, Unix, *BSD, Linux training
	  	 	 http://www.pugetsoundtechnology.com/