Re: suggestion: Host fly-off between pkgin and nih and subsequent official integration

[Jonathan Perkin <jperkin%joyent.com@localhost>]

* On 2013-04-16 at 12:29 BST, John Marino wrote:

> On 4/16/2013 13:11, Jonathan Perkin wrote:
> >Binary package managers are only useful when there are binary packages
> >available to install.  Simply building and installing pkgin by default
> >won't really help matters, the real work is to ensure that users have
> >repositories available of up-to-date packages ready to install.
> 
> The situation for FreeBSD is different.  "pkg" is used during the
> packaging of the software too.  It's building up the repository
> database that will later be downloaded by another instance of pkg
> from any user that wants to install packages from that repository.
> Now it's perfectly possible that I'm comparing apples to oranges
> here because I don't understand exactly how these two managers work.

Yes, this is somewhat apples vs oranges.  pkgin is a wrapper around
the pkg_* tools, and uses information in the pkg_summary file
generated by bulk builds to provide an interface for
installing/upgrading packages from an URL.

Hence installing pkgin by default in and of itself achieves nothing.

> >I'd rather see effort put into more bulk builds and distributing
> >bootstrap packages which include a configured and ready to use pkgin
> >install, as we do for SmartOS/illumos and OSX.
> 
> 1. I think this is an orthogonal issue.
> 2. Personally I'll probably starting working on some of related
> issues because I'd like to use pkgsrc on OmniOS and bootstrapping is
> as obnoxious there as it was for OpenIndiana (e.g. gcc 4.6 has to be
> installed from another source first among other issues).

It should be enough to run:

  $ pkg install gcc46 header linker lint object-file header-math

to install everything required to bootstrap on OmniOS, otherwise you
are welcome to simply use my existing bootstrap kit and 9,800 binary
packages for illumos:

  http://www.perkin.org.uk/posts/whats-new-in-pkgsrc-2013Q1.html

which will have the added benefit of letting you experience pkgin ;)

-- 
Jonathan Perkin  -  Joyent, Inc.  -  www.joyent.com