Compatability with FreeBSD Ports [debian package tools]

[Andreas Hauser]

hmp wrote @ Thu, 18 Aug 2005 02:28:19 +0100:

> Well, to be honest with you Jon, I certainly haven't tried sending "compat 
> patches" to Kris or any of the senior ports people so I am not going to 
> judge on that basis.  If someone has tried this and got denied, please 
> speak up; this is a tangent by the way. :-)

I once submitted patch to bsd.port.mk. Even though it needed some
persistence it was committed:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=72182

> The average guy who wants to get a system up and running from a Live-CD 
> and then install things like GUI, editors, will not really care about 
> source level "broohah" at all.

The average guy installing a system intended to be SSI cluster ?
That we happen to run it as our desktop marks us hardly as average guys.
Think you have a wrong impression of the cummunity there.
They are all perverts running ion/*box/xfce4/9wm etc. if they run that
stupid GUI stuff at all (thx to Sascha's syscons enhancements).

> Lets be honest with ourselves, most of us do not bother with source level 
> building of packages that are available in binary form.  If I really did 
> not trust an application, I would build from source, but this does not 
> describe 90% of the people out there.

I know many ppl that will _only_ install via source.
Maybe those 90% you are talking about don't run DragonFly in the first place?

> >>Can we not use ports or pkgsrc as our build part of the problem, and
> >>produce packages that are understandable by APT* ?

I am not at all convinced that some other backend solves the problem.
But making ports/pkgsrc produce other binary pkg types would be cool.

> Custom built packages SHOULD NOT be registered with the rest because this 
> will definitely not help while upgrading or during maintenance.  They 
> marked as custom built and left alone, if necessary otherwise the chance 
> of screwing up the system just increased.

That can be done with pkgtools.conf btw.

> Source level upgrades have always created some form of problem for me and 
> it seems a lot of other people as well.  Definitely not something that is 
> viable or trust-worthy.

No it's something you do on a special build host until you produce a quality
of packages you are satisfied with. Then you distribute those packages
to your other hosts. That is certainly power i am not willing to give up.

> To summarise, at this point in time, I do not really give a crap for 
> building applications from source when a perfectly working binary package 
> is being offered.  It should be the responsibility of the package builders 
> to take care of source building for us, not the end user.  Period.

It doubt there will be 10000 "perfectly working binary" packages.

Imagine you want to support 2 compilers then you need 2 * 10000 packages.
Imagine that you also want to support 2 libc versions that makes 4 * 10000.
Formula:
2^Number_of_exclusive_options * 10000

And Clusters are something you want to tune anyways.


Andy