The ports-system and userland in general.

[Devon H. O'Dell]

Weapon of Mass Deduction wrote:
Hello all,

I remember Matthew explaining he's looking for
a better alternative to NetBSD pkgsrc for the
ports-system, as a reaction to some people
proposing pkgsrc.
I'm currently thinking out a good userland
architecture, so I would like to know what
qualities he or others is/are especially looking
for then.
This also applies to the userland. Of course
something about this is already written down
at http://www.dragonflybsd.org/goals/userapi.cgi ,
but that article focusses on the programmatic
plans, not too much on the functional.

There have been miscellaneous discussions / arguments / bikesheds about 
this subject on IRC and on the lists. Simon (corecode) has done some 
research into it; Will_D has as well, and there are obviously efforts of 
other parties to get pkgsrc working with additional DragonFly-specific 
functionality (as I understand it).

At this point, I can't say that anybody has definite goals. All people 
have different ideas about what a perfect package manager should do. If 
you're interested in making one, there is a link on the Wiki to some 
discussion and research about this.

The concensus seems to be:

    o It shouldn't be ports
    o It should be made ground-up
    o It should allow multiple versions of a program to be installed
    o It should allow for easy upgrades
    o It should allow for source building and binary packages
Simon (corecode) has ideas about the format needed to store information 
about the packages. I don't know much about this, but it's something 
that seriously needs reworking.

There may be more points, but I don't know what they were. Something 
that would be interesting would be a way to port files from pkgsrc or 
ports (or other build systems) over to Whatever Build System, which 
would reduce the need to manage $BIGNUM files with such a small team.

I think the best idea is to get started on something and, when you've 
got something working, talk about it. If it works well, other people 
will use it. Maybe it'll be incorporated as our ``official system''. 
Maybe not. But at the least it'll be a good idea of what works and what 
doesn't.

--Devon