New FreeBSD package system (a.k.a. Daemon Package System (dps))

[Ivan Voras]

David Naylor wrote:
> Dear Jordan
> 
> Recently I stumbled across a document you wrote in 2001, entitled "FreeBSD 
> installation and package tools, past, present and future".  I find FreeBSD 
> appealing and I would like to contribute it its success, and as your article 
> describes, the installation and packaging system is lacking.  Since the 
> installation system is being tackled under a SoC project I am hoping to give 
> the packaging system a go.  

I've just read the document, and since I was also thinking about the
ports/packages system lately, here are a few random ideas:

- I think it's time to give up on using BDB+directory tree full of text
files for storing the installed packages database, and I propose all of
this be replaced by a single SQLite database. SQLite is public domain
(can be slurped into base system), embeddable, stores all data in a
single file, lightweight, fast, and can be used to do fancy things such
as reporting. The current pkg_info's behaviour that takes *noticable*
*time* to generate 1 line of output per package is horrible in this day
and age. And the upcoming X11/X.Org 7.2 with cca 400 packages (which is
in itself horrible just for a X11 system) will make it unbearable (also
portupgrade which already looks slower by the day).

- A quick test confirms that the current bsdtar will happily ignore any
extra data at the end of a tgz/tbz archive, so package metadata can be
embedded there, thus conserving existing infrastructure and being fast
to parse. I suggest encoding this metadata in a sane and easy to parse
XML structure.

I cannot currently actively participate in implementing proposed things,
but I can give advice on sqlite, database and xml schemas if anyone
wants to...


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