pkgsrc packaging of base?

[Erik P. Skaalerud]

Oliver Fromme wrote:
 > Oliver, You have to put yourself in the new user's shoes. It's not easy 
 > at all to manually patch sourcecode and rebuild the appropriate binaries 
 > and libraries.

It _is_ easy.  The FreeBSD Security Advisories contain
detailed step-by-step instruction.
[snip]
So what exactly is so difficult about that?  Well, of
course it could be automated even further, by providing
a tool which automatically looks an advisory, then
downloads any patches, applies them etc., so the user
doesn't have to copy&paste "strange looking commands".
But that's just a detail, it doesn't change the way it
works.
Perhaps I'm a bit biased here, because I am one of those who can't quite 
figure out any good reason to keep compiling software, when todays 
modern computers are powerful enough that they wont get any advantage 
from optimizations. It's just a matter of providing binaries for 
different archs (i686,i586). Wich is something this discussion is about, 
putting userland and kernel into a package management system wich will 
make it easier for users to update their systems.

It would also probably make systems more secure with a tool that you 
described (one that downloads and installs security fixes with a simple 
command), as not all users subscribe to a mailing list to get security 
notifications. Windows Update and its agent is a perfect example.

I'm not saying that it's extremely difficult to patch sourcecode and 
recompile, I'm just stating that it should not be the only choice when 
we could have a much easier system for performing the task (like apt).

- Erik