Re: pkg_add and remote packages

[Dieter Baron <dillo%KD119105101110.ppp-bb.dion.ne.jp@localhost>]

hi,

: The big question here is how to deal with packages that have missing
: dependencies. It is not possible to start open the stream from the
: remote side, figure out something is missing and start to install that.
: Consider the connection limit on ftp.netbsd.org for reasons.

  If we required a up-to-date pkg_summary, you could use this to
extract the dependency tree before fetching anything.  This would also
catch wether the package or one of its dependencies would cause
conflicts with the currently installed packages and abort early.  I
think this is the way we should eventually go.


  Just a random thought (don't know how practical/efficient/useful it
is): You could abort the data connection after you fetched the
metadata and found missing dependencies, then refetch afterwards
(possibly resuming where you left off).

: One way to greatly simplify the code is to just fetch the package to
: /var/tmp or whatever and install it afterwards like a local package.
: This does increase the temporary space used, but as the next step in the
: evolution will switch to inplace extraction, that is only temporary.
: It also makes it easy to provide a local cache directory.

: What do others think about this?

  Sounds reasonable.  As others have noted, optionally keeping the
cache in /var/pkg and not deleting the binary packages after use would
be a nice feature.


                                        yours,
                                        dillo