Question about packages

Andrew P. infofarmer at gmail.com
Thu Sep 29 15:32:34 PDT 2005


On 9/30/05, Charles Swiger <cswiger at mac.com> wrote:
> On Sep 29, 2005, at 4:38 PM, Milscvaer wrote:
> > How often are the binary packages in 5-stable for instance
> > rebuilt to the latest version? It is pretty critical
> > to keep these updated constantly, preferably every
> > day, to get the latest security fixes in a new version
> > of a package. I noticed that Firefox still seems to be
> > at 1.0.6 even though 1.0.7 has been out for several
> > days. Does FreeBSD have a system set up where when a
> > port is upgraded to a new version, the binary package
> > for the port is automatically rebuilt soon after, such
> > as at least within the next day so that the latest
> > version in ports is also avialable as a binary
> > package. This is very essential. I hope such a feature
> > can be provided.
>
> The cluster of machines used to build precompiled packages operates
> pretty much continuously, as you can see for yourself at:
>
> http://pointyhat.freebsd.org/errorlogs/
>
> As this link says, "Last full run on 5.x-stable [i386 (2005-09-27
> 05:24)]" was two days ago, and a new run is in progress which ought
> to have Firefox 1.0.7 and anything else which has been updated since
> the last run was started.  Note that building 13000 ports takes quite
> a while, so expecting less than 24-hour turnaround for binary
> packages might be too optimistic.
>
> So if you want software updated more quickly, build it yourself--
> updating the 10 ports that you actually use is a lot easier than
> building everything.  Or you could donate more hardware to the
> FreeBSD project, or even set up your own build cluster if you think
> you can do a better job.
>
> > Does also, is anything done to avoid the situation
> > where an older program needs an older version of a
> > dependancies and a newer program needs a newer version
> > of the same depedancy?
>
> Why, yes, people use shared library version numbers, or they install
> to different base prefixes, or any number of similar methods.  For
> popular software like the Berkeley DB, this support is well-
> integrated into the ports system and the options menu that many ports
> will display, using WITH_BDB_VER.  These mechanisms are documented in
> the Porter's Handbook here:
>
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/porters-handbook/
> makefile-options.html#AEN2286
>
> > Does portupgrade leave older versions of a library
> > dependancy in place when installing a new version of
> > such a dependancy, so that applications that require
> > the newer version of the dependancy can use the new
> > version, while applications that need the older
> > version can use the older version?
>
> Yes, it does.  Consider the output of "du -a /usr/local/lib/compat/"...
>
> --
> -Chuck
>
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>

Everyone,

I've been actually thinking about this whole subject
for the last few days. We've got to do something in
order to make major few hundred packages lag by not
more than a few hours.

Ideally, we should have a tool for distributed, but
secure port-building.

In the absence of such a tool, we should think of
something very simple, but workable. E.g., to ask
users to send in SHA checksums of their built
packages (with very specific build environment),
compare them to each other (verify) and ask one
of them to send the package itself to a central
location (ftp.freebsd.org).

Better yet - is to employ bittorrent, which would
do the hashing thing automatically, and provide
for a very fast download for anyone.

I really think that it's very simple and only takes
a tad of a spare time of one man to do it.

Personally, I have several machines at home
and at work, running FreeBSD i386 and amd64
day and night. They're currently wasting their
CPU cycles on dnetc, and I will gladly start
building all kinds of packages, but I don't have
much bandwidth to spare (hardly to upload,
impossible to distribute).

Please, those directly involved into the freebsd
project, step forward - and let's decide on
something. It's not time-critical, but it can't be
ignored forever.

People spend much of their free time in order
to keep the ports tree astonishingly up-to-date
(more up-to-date than software in any other OS I've
ever used). We've only got to spend machine
time, but the packages lag by weeks sometimes.


Thanks,
Andrew P.


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