FreeBSD problems and preliminary ways to solve

[Vadim Goncharov]

Hi Baptiste Daroussin! 

On Thu, 18 Aug 2011 07:49:30 +0000; Baptiste Daroussin wrote about 'Re: FreeBSD problems and preliminary ways to solve':

> My reply only concerns package/ports management.
> Most of what you are expecting from the ports tree is coming soon (new 
> option framework) and most of what you are expecting from binary 
> packages will be done with pkgng.

Good news!

> Just have a look https://github.com/pkgng/pkgng for pkgng it is still 
> experimental but works quite well :).

I've looked to wiki.freebsd.org before that and there was almost empty page.
An illustration of another social problem - more should be known to the user
in the first place...

>> 3) Conflicts: no way to have apache13 and apache22 the same time.
> This is not a problem of the infrastructure nor of the package tools, 
> this has to deal with the said ports.
> I'm pretty sure if you come with a path to solve this (for example 
> avoid file conflicts)

Separate PREFIX? How is it solved on another systems?

>> 4) No dependence on base system. You may cut out something, recompile
>>    world, deploy it on cluster and just then see that some packages are
>>    now don't work.
>>
>> 6) Update problems. The version is just coded into name of package, and
>>    dependencies are on the entire name, so there are situations when
>>    install/upgrade of just one package may require rebuild 3/4 of all
>>    pkgs. You cannot easiy modify installed package without editing pkgdb
>>    manually. It is impossible to upgrade/replace package by out of the
>>    box tools.
>>

> This will be solve with pkgng

And base system too? I've forgotten to write another idea in previous letter:
the kernel nowadays has FEATURE() macros which application could check, so
for packages something may be deployed, e.g. @basefeature GCC etc.
Same with $OSVERSION.

>>  * OPTIONS need radio-buttons (e.g. only one of MySQL, PostgreSQL,
>>    SQLite) and dialog(1) supports it.
>>
> This is coming soon to the ports tree, time to do more testings

The both versions "exactly one must be set" & "zero or one must be set" ?

>> Also, if packages are equal in rights to ports, they need 
>> integrity/security check. So, package file name is now like:
>>
>>   softina-1.2.3_1:repo.id:1312929890.tbz   # chars allowed by windows

> pkgng have an experimental multi repository support, even if we focus 
> on a clean single repository support.

Are there digital signatures for them in TODO ? :)

>> Their developments of pkg_* tools contain facilities to implement a 
>> good package manager out-of-the-box, e.g. pkg_add there has flags:
>>
>>  | -A      Mark package as installed automatically, as dependency of
>>  |         another package.  You can use
>>  |                pkg_admin set automatic=YES
>>  |         to mark packages this way after installation, and
>>  |                pkg_admin unset automatic
>>  |         to remove the mark.  If you pkg_add a package without
>>  |         specifying  -A after it had already been automatically
>>  |         installed, the mark is removed.
>>  | -U      Replace an already installed version from a package.
>>  |         Implies -u.
>>  | -u      If the package that's being installed is already installed,
>>  |         an update is performed.
>>
>> These are crucial to effective binary package management.
>>
> All of this can be done a better way with pkgng



-- 
WBR, Vadim Goncharov. ICQ#166852181       mailto:vadim_nuclight at mail.ru
[Moderator of RU.ANTI-ECOLOGY][FreeBSD][http://antigreen.org][LJ:/nuclight]