Gavan Fantom wrote:
> Such a separation is not just philosophical. As soon as you have pkg_add
> consulting the source, you lose the ability to bulk build on one
> machine, and then install binary packages on many others without
> installing the source. I would be very surprised if there aren't many
> people out there doing just that right now.

This is an argument of the form "if implemented badly, the idea wouldn't
work," which is a species of strawman.

The use case where the current system loses badly is the case where
the user does have pkgsrc installed and needs the system to efficiently
install from binary where possible and build from source where
necessary. The case is adequately covered by conditional behavior in
pkg_add that is activated by a special option only when pkg_add is
invoked by the make system, and that was mentioned in the original
proposal http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-pkg/2005/03/20/0023.html
about a year ago.

Would that create a problem of the form "pkg_add behaves differently
for users without pkgsrc installed?" No, because the behavior difference
is only visible in the use cases that are unavailable when pkgsrc is
not present.

-Chap