Ideas and questions on pkgsrc

Chris Turner c.turner at 199technologies.org
Tue Apr 13 00:16:33 PDT 2010


Aggelos Economopoulos wrote:
Well, w/o having seen the code, this sounds like a bit of a hack :) Also
I'm not sure what problem you're solving. Pkgsrc already has working
package dependencies. The serious issue is with handling upgrades.
yup. possibly so.

Problem solving: installing a box that does X, and specifying a box
  that does 'X' simply.
e.g.: my desktop is 80%

windowmaker
nautilus
firefox
aterm
emacs
and webdev is 80%

apache
postgres
p-languages
therefore 'workstation' ==

require desktop
require webdev
and I'm done - and I don't care if package 'foo' switched to 
latest-desktop-technology-blah v4.6d in the meantime, and I don't
have to track it in the makefiles.

also makes it easy to make tools that automate system builds, etc..

Eh, to do this properly you'd have to upgrade all packages depending on
your 'base' packages and all packages depending on those packages and so
on ("transitive closure").
I'd only really do this for 'core' things - like a DNS server, MTA, etc.

(those pesky types of things that keep getting moved out of base)

these tend to be highly contested leaf-nodes, which don't really
have dependancies - aka things that 'used to be' part of the OS.
I personally blow away the entire system at each release - and
don't really do much in the middle (effectively 'upgrading all 
packages') . Test box gets test packages - if I get the time to do it. 
Though I'm adressing my workflow as I get back up to speed from where I 
was ~2y ago..














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