Package download statistics

[Justin Sherrill]

On Sun, Jun 2, 2013 at 8:32 AM, John Marino <dragonflybsd at marino.st> wrote:

> The bigger question, of course, is *why* pkgsrc users are likely to build
> from source?  Could it be that they had lots of issues with that in the
> past?  Who wouldn't want something fast and quick if it were trustworthy?
> The "indication" alone is telling.

Pkgsrc binary availability has been spotty in the past, and while I've
been able on some releases to upgrade pkgsrc completely with binaries,
it wasn't uniformly easy, and that's still been only some of the
releases.

I'm the fool that was building the pkgsrc binaries, and _I_ was
recommending that people use pkg-rolling_replace - it led to the least
amount of surprise for people.  We have never had a good,
always-up-to-date collection of binaries for pkgsrc, and there's a
number of reasons: the person building them (me) wasn't the person
fixing them, the person fixing them would burn out from the work, the
build cycle took weeks when it worked, the build cycle would take even
longer when it didn't work, pkgsrc traditionally was a from-source
system, I am an idiot, etc.

Anyway, I'm happy to not build pkgsrc binaries for our next release.
It sounds like it wouldn't impact many people, since they'd probably
be working from source anyway.