Any new packages?

Justin Sherrill justin at shiningsilence.com
Sun Sep 29 11:01:00 PDT 2013


DragonFly and pkgsrc go through a repeated pattern where a package will
update in pkgsrc and break on DragonFly.  Someone using DragonFly will get
commit access for pkgsrc and be able to correct problems... and then gets
overwhelmed because it's effectively solo package maintenance for 10,000
packages.  Even with that, packages would break from release to release
because they'd be updated in pkgsrc and break on DragonFly, and the pkgsrc
maintainers were busy on other platforms.

Pkgsrc also doesn't really have a workable binary solution, and the
quarterly release scheme generally worked out so that each DragonFly
release had up to date packages for at best half of a release's lifetime -
usually less.

Dports specifically creates binary packages for use, with all the
advantages that provides, and uses FreeBSD's ports system as an underlay,
so there are more ports to use (20K vs 11K, I think)  It's possible to
create dports-specific overlays, so if something is removed or changed to
be incompatible in FreeBSD, it won't break the corresponding item in
dports; the older version will continue to be built.

Pkgsrc has been very useful for DragonFly, and several of the pkgsrc
developers have been very helpful to me and to others, but dports is
filling the need for third-party software management more efficiently.


On Sun, Sep 29, 2013 at 9:38 AM, Pierre Abbat <phma at bezitopo.org> wrote:

> On Thursday, September 26, 2013 20:50:16 Justin Sherrill wrote:
> > No, no pkgsrc binaries have been built.  Someone else can jump in to do
> so
> > if they want, but it won't be me.  The next release will be with dports.
>
> Why are we switching to dports?
>
> Pierre
> --
> loi mintu se ckaji danlu cu jmaji
>
>
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