My interactive version of pkg_add

Michel Talon talon at lpthe.jussieu.fr
Sat Sep 27 14:02:39 UTC 2008


Marin Atanasov wrote:

> So what do you think - is it worth improving upon it or it's a waste of
> time?
> Thanks for any suggestions.

I think it is worth improving and certainly not a waste of time.
Each work which allows to use precompiled packages more efficiently
in FreeBSD is very useful, in my opinion. While compiling ports
is very fine on a server, where only a small number of ports are
installed - and then the tool "portmaster" does that really
wonderfully, looking at the other extreme, a desktop with around
a thousand installed ports is better managed through precompiled
packages. And, sorry, but portupgrade is not the solution to do that,
either with the -P or -PP option.

I can only concur with the suggestion you mention, exploring ftp sites
to discover what is available here. How to do that efficiently is
harder. Apparently "official" FreeBSD ftp sites have an INDEX of
available packages. I hope it is reliable. Then i suggest to download it
and work from that.

Best regards

-- 

Michel TALON



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