Ideas and questions on pkgsrc

[Aggelos Economopoulos]

Chris Turner wrote:
> Aggelos Economopoulos wrote:
>>
>> Well, w/o having seen the code, this sounds like a bit of a hack :) Also
>> I'm not sure what problem you're solving. Pkgsrc already has working
>> package dependencies. The serious issue is with handling upgrades.
>>
> 
> yup. possibly so.
> 
> Problem solving: installing a box that does X, and specifying a box
>   that does 'X' simply.
> 
> e.g.: my desktop is 80%
> 
> windowmaker
> nautilus
> firefox
> aterm
> emacs

*Shrug*. OK, sure, why not. But for general use, metapackages seem to
work well enough. In fact I'm not sure why you can't just reuse *that*
concept (i.e. create appropriate metapackages instead of ad-hoc scripts.

> and webdev is 80%
> 
> apache
> postgres
> p-languages

Heh. Those are all arbitrary choices really. Not terribly useful to a
general user audience.

> therefore 'workstation' ==
> 
> require desktop
> require webdev
> 
> and I'm done - and I don't care if package 'foo' switched to
> latest-desktop-technology-blah v4.6d in the meantime, and I don't
> have to track it in the makefiles.

You have to track it in your 'profile' though, not sure why that's better.

> also makes it easy to make tools that automate system builds, etc..
> 
>>
>> Eh, to do this properly you'd have to upgrade all packages depending on
>> your 'base' packages and all packages depending on those packages and so
>> on ("transitive closure").
>>
> 
> I'd only really do this for 'core' things - like a DNS server, MTA, etc.
> 
> (those pesky types of things that keep getting moved out of base)
> 
> these tend to be highly contested leaf-nodes, which don't really
> have dependancies - aka things that 'used to be' part of the OS.
> 
> I personally blow away the entire system at each release

Yah, see, that's what Justin was talking about. Tell *that* to someone
who's been using apt-get/yum/urpmi/whatever and they'll just feel sorry
for you.

> - and
> don't really do much in the middle (effectively 'upgrading all
> packages') . Test box gets test packages - if I get the time to do it.
> Though I'm adressing my workflow as I get back up to speed from where I
> was ~2y ago..

Aggelos