Re: pkg_add and remote packages

[Joerg Sonnenberger <joerg%britannica.bec.de@localhost>]

On Fri, Apr 04, 2008 at 10:47:48PM +0300, Aleksey Cheusov wrote:
> IMHO using library for this kind of tasks is a very serious design BUG.
> This is absolutely obvious. Proxies, unusual
> protocols for fetching (CIFS/smbclient for example),
> p2p networks, etc. etc. etc.

You know how pkg_add interacts with ftp(1)? That is not exactly a
protocol to replicate with different backend. The biggests problem with
using external programs here is that it creates chicken-and-egg problems
like we already have for other parts of the bootstrap packages. E.g. how do
you update nbpax on !NetBSD? Proxies are a bad example, they are a
standard interface and supported by any decent HTTP library. Unusual
protocols are exactly that. Why use smbclient if you can just mount the
filesystem etc. I don't say it doesn't make sense to support external
programs for this kind of operations, but the code in the current form
has no clean interface and before that doesn't change I am not willing
to spend any mental cycles on that. Support for HTTP and FTP is the 99%
solution -- if that works properly, I am willing to talk with the edge
cases.

Joerg