Pacman?

[Pieter Dumon]

As a sidenote: someone is porting Portage from Gentoo/Linux over to
Dragonfly, and it's being ported to FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.
This means both the (source-based) package installation infrastructure
(however,I don't know if they're replacing pkgsrc on NetBSD or using
it, for example), and the initscripts infrastructure. It's basically
bash+python under GPL (and now I hear some people saying "yuk!" ;-) ).
See http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/bsd/index.xml

With portage, you can choose between being stable or using the latest
of the latest, with new package versions usually being integrated in
portage in just a couple of days or less (although being marked
unstable, that is). But pkgsrc-wip solves this.
It's more userfriendly with regard to dependencies and updates than
pkgsrc, but pkgsrc has its advantages, and there's a large amount of
effort put
into it to port it to DFly, so I think its better to put effort in
pkgsrc than in alternatives.
Pieter



On 8/16/06, Vivek Ayer <vivek.ayer at xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Whatever it may be, I like pacman, bash and all the other shells out there.

Archlinux has many packages in its repository that require patching as
well. This shouldn't be a giant hurdle. The thing is it would kind of
be neat to write scripts in a different shell. This would also give
the archlinux team some feedback. Frugalware, a distro that grew out
of a love for pacman and Slackware uses bash scripts, but then again
this shouldn't be the only shell to write things into. Pacman is open
source, which means it can be rewritten and be licensed under BSD to
be renamed to...i dunno...zacman (zsh)....or shacman (sh) or tschacman
(tsch) or well you get the idea. This would give the dfly user base a
chance to decide whether they prefer pkgsrc or pacman.
I've used pkgsrc and I'm not a 100% comfortable with it. It doesn't do
updates like pacman. Then again, pacman update is binary repo only and
pkgsrc can do source. In archlinux, you would use ABS, so really
pkgsrc does the job of two managers. But like it said on the pkgsrc
wikipedia article, pkgsrc can be a good secondary package manager
considering pacman does get ported to dfly, which I'm 100% willing to
help in whatever shell you all want.
Vivek