Implement another package management in DfBSD

[Michael Neumann]

Am 17. Januar 2026 00:54:21 MEZ schrieb Sayed Mohammad Badiezadegan <mbzadegan at gmail.com>:
>The BSD I was reminded of is *PacBSD, *which is no longer live. So, it is a
>good proposal to support pacman in DragonflyBSD in the future.


I like pacman on Arch. But keep
in mind that most software is developed with Linux in mind and requires often some patching to run properly on BSDs (looks at chromium, which requires hundreds of patches). This patching is a lot of work. Look at Julia language: it likely builds fine on Linux. All this knowledge about how to build a package on BSD needs to be maintained by someone. Using pacman on Dragonfly will not do it. It won't build htop, it won't build julia etc. unless someone makes it work.

Ravenports is interesting, because it supports multiple operating systems, so you can also use it on Linux or Freebsd, and it has a good set of packages in recent versions. 

Regards,

Michael



>
>Ravenports, advised by Michael Neumann, has resolved my htop issue. Thanks .
>
>On Fri, Jan 16, 2026 at 2:43 PM Pierre-Alain TORET <pierre-alain at toret.fr>
>wrote:
>
>> I never heard of a BSD using pacman as the package manager, but I
>> remember the project Hyperbola which did and evolved into HyperbolaBSD,
>> maybe that's what you had in mind ?
>>
>> To answer your remark about DPorts and htop, being able to compile a
>> piece of software on DragonFlyBSD doesn't depend on the packaging
>> system, it depends on 2 things :
>> - does the project support DragonFlyBSD upstream ? if yes, that will
>> compile easily
>> - if not, did someone take care of porting / patching the upstream code
>> to make it compile on DragonFlyBSD, if not, it won't compile
>>
>> But htop's case is a bit special, because it compiles fine, the failure
>> you reported in a previous message is due to the build process not being
>> happy because the manpage is not where the plist says it is.
>>
>> You can apply the following diff to build it :
>>
>> diff --git a/sysutils/htop/Makefile b/sysutils/htop/Makefile
>> index 62e309a804a..c94adfdcc80 100644
>> --- a/sysutils/htop/Makefile
>> +++ b/sysutils/htop/Makefile
>> @@ -23,7 +23,7 @@ GNU_CONFIGURE=        yes
>>   CONFIGURE_ARGS=        --enable-unicode
>>
>>   PLIST_FILES=   bin/htop \
>> -               man/man1/htop.1.gz \
>> +               share/man/man1/htop.1.gz \
>>                  share/applications/htop.desktop \
>>                  share/icons/hicolor/scalable/apps/htop.svg \
>>                  share/pixmaps/htop.png
>>
>> Le 13/01/2026 à 00:24, Sayed Mohammad Badiezadegan a écrit :
>> > Thank you for your response, but I prefer Gentoo Linux when I want to
>> > work with sources, so I am not interested in working with dports in
>> > DfBSD that cannot compile a simple program like *htop*.
>> >
>> > DfBSD has only one package management system, in my opinion. It is *PKG.*
>> >
>> >
>> > On Mon, Jan 12, 2026 at 3:13 PM Lucas Holt <lucasholt at mac.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >     Several of the BSDs have at least two ports collections and
>> >     package managers that run on them.  If you don’t like one, use the
>> >     other.
>> >
>> >     Lucas Holt
>> >
>> >>     On Jan 12, 2026, at 5:47 PM, Sayed Mohammad Badiezadegan
>> >>     <mbzadegan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >>
>> >>     
>> >>     Hey guys,
>> >>
>> >>     I remembered that many years ago, there was a BSD that used
>> >>     "*Pacman*" for its package management.
>> >>
>> >>     Is it possible to use it in DfBSD? What about other package
>> >>     management systems, such as *Portage*, ...?
>> >>     --
>> >>     ----------------------------------------------------
>> >>     /~ Sayed/
>> >>     /M.Sc. Cryptography/
>> >>     /My Research area/ <https://mbzadegan.github.io/>
>> >>     /ResearchGate profile:/
>> >>     /
>> >>     /
>> >>     /Richmond, BC, Canada/
>> >
>>