confusion, dports, pkg, and pkgsrc

John Marino dragonflybsd at marino.st
Thu May 9 13:50:34 PDT 2013


On 5/9/2013 22:34, Antonio Olivares wrote:
> I am now confused.  I see that there is pkg, which is like pkg_add,
> pkg_delete, ..., in old FreeBSD now they have pkgng and the old tried
> and true FreeBSD ports.  The dports is now in DragonFlyBSD making use
> of the FreeBSD ports pkgng stuff to install binary packages and avoid
> compiling packages.  I see that this is gaining momentum according to
> the numbers:

I agree; you seem confused. :)

Fact 1: "pkg" is dedicated to dports.  if you are using it, you're using 
dports.

Fact 2: "pkg" is a binary package manager.  The presence or lack of it 
doesn't stop you from building from source.  The experience is pretty 
much exactly the same as FreeBSD except DragonFly doesn't install any of 
the "pkg_add, pkg_install, pkg_*" tools for dports because pkg does all 
that natively.  In a few months, FreeBSD will also get rid of these 
tools make the differences between FreeBSD and DragonFly even less.

Fact 3: conversely, tools like "pkg_radd" are dedicated to pkgsrc.

Fact 4: It sounds like you are already mixing these two systems.  You 
can't do that.  You have to pick one or the other.  If you pick dports, 
you have to relocate /usr/pkg to prevent dports from picking pkgsrc 
libraries up during a build or perhaps with ldconfig.


> and I did not even know this, but basic install already had a copy of
> firefox 19.0.2 installed.  I used pkgsrc to build xfce and it
> installed xfce 4.6 which is kind of old, so I would need to track
> latest pkgsrc to get the newest one? On FreeBSD xfce is 4.10.x or so
> version.  How do I get the latest one?

As DragonFly Ports come from FreeBSD, dports has XFCE 4.10 as well. 
Pkgsrc is significantly behind.  If you pick pkgsrc, you're stick with 4.6.

> I had a booting error so I reinstalled OS and have used pkg to install
> unzip.  Is the pkg tool the one that uses Dports?
> If so and I decide to use pkg to install packages to update them
> easily what is needed?

You're asking questions covered in the howto and other topics.
Try here for more info about dports:
http://www.shiningsilence.com/dbsdlog/category/dports

--John



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