DragonFly pkgsrc policy for packages without freely or generally available sources

Venkatesh Srinivas me at acm.jhu.edu
Sat May 19 06:08:26 PDT 2012


On Sat, May 19, 2012 at 8:29 AM, John Marino <dragonflybsd at marino.st> wrote:
> Pkgsrc will occasionally maintain packages in the repository that no longer
> have retrievable source tarballs and also legally restrict others from
> hosting copies of them.  The justification is that some older users may
> still be in possession of the source tarballs, and the package is maintained
> for these very few people.
>
> Personally I disagree with this philosophy.  Pkgsrc packages should be
> buildable by anyone as a minimum requirement for being a package, and if
> this capability is lost, I believe the package should be removed from pkgsrc
> once it's clear the capability will never be regained.
>
> Along the same vein, there are some packages that depend on sources that one
> has to purchase.  I wouldn't be shocked if all of these only worked for
> NetBSD only.
>
> Since the unavailable packages aren't getting removed upstream, I'm going to
> mark them all NOT-FOR-DRAGONFLY.  Currently this is less than 10 packages.
>  The ones depending on commercially-purchased source tarballs will also be
> marked NOT-FOR-DRAGONFLY.
>
> For the vast majority of users, this will not affect you in the least
> (unless you run the bulk build script, then your life will improve).  If you
> find yourself with sources to build one of these packages, you can simply
> comment out the NOT-FOR-PLATFORM+= DragonFly-*-* line in the Makefile before
> trying to build it.

Just for reference, can you point of some/all of these packages?

Thanks!
-- vs;
http://ops101.org/4k/





More information about the Users mailing list