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

On Tue, Apr 16, 2013 at 2:18 PM, John Marino <netbsd%marino.st@localhost> wrote:

On 4/16/2013 13:02, Aleksey Cheusov wrote:

I think I understand why people may want to see "official package manager"
but it's not clear for me what is the purpose of "integration",
especially if you say
about mk/*. Can you explain?

Sure. In ports, the mk. has been modified such that pkg (the "official" binary package manager) is automatically included as a dependency for every single port.

To be honest. I think this is absolutely useless. First, it just doesn't improve usability.

Second, this may lead to circles in package dependencies.

Finally, have a look at Linux systems.

Debian and some of its derivatives, for example, have two package managers: apt and aptitude. I think this is a right way. Personally, I don't like what FreeBSD devs did.

The reason is that pkg has its own database which is not compatible with the pkg_* tools databases.

FreeBSD devs decided to bury pkg_* because their pkg_* was, sorry, just a crap.

If you compare man pages of pkgsrc's and FreeBSD pkg_add, for example, you'll see the difference. They didn't have even pkg_add -u! The same for -U, -A, pkg_admin etc. etc. etc.

This is why their higher level tools worked directly with pkgdb.

So, situation with pkgsrc is completely different. Both pkgin (AFAIK) and nih work on top of pkg_* and this is good. We don't need pkg(1).

What we currently lack is ability to [re]build packages and then install them using _single_ tool. I plan to implement this in nih.

It's well known that "make replace" is only for pkgsrc developers :-)

I don't know of any other way to do it other than rolling replace though. It seems like it is for anyone that tries to build from source rather than prebuild binaries.

I use it regularly during development. But this is offtopic.