pkgsrc opinions?

Rahul Siddharthan rsidd at online.fr
Sun Mar 27 21:16:02 PST 2005


After a long break using linux (because of hardware reasons) I started
playing with DragonFly on my laptop again.  I had bad memories of the
ports system -- it may have been good for its time, but it just doesn't
cut it now even on FreeBSD, and there are additional incompatibilities
on DragonFly; and portupgrade is an ugly kludge.  So I decided to wipe
all my ports and give pkgsrc a spin.

I'm favourably impressed with the features of pkgsrc.  It seems to
contain everything a package management system should need.  When
possible I installed prebuilt binaries from gobsd.org, but even
otherwise, everything I tried builds out of the box or with minor
fixes.   If prebuilt packages can be made available fairly regularly,
it could be a good competitor to Debian's apt, the only package
management system I've seen that "just works".

What's the "official" view on pkgsrc?  Is it a good idea for DragonFly
to move to it and drop ports?  Are there any advantages at all to
ports, other than numbers and (for the moment) better compatibility?
the way I see it, ports will get increasingly broken on DragonFly as
time goes by, while if pkgsrc becomes "officially" supported, the
breakages there will be easier to fix.

Rahul





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