new package system proposal

[Jonathan McKeown]

On Tuesday 07 April 2009 23:35:03 Bob Johnson wrote:
> On 4/4/09, Chris Whitehouse <cwhiteh at onetel.com> wrote:
> > Hi all
>
> [...]
>
> > My suggestion is to start with a ports tree that is fixed in time. Make
> > that ports tree available as part of this package system and compile a
> > typical desktop set of ports, particularly choosing ones which are large
> > or have many dependencies. When it is all complete release it and start
> > again. Surely quite a wide selection of desktops, wm's and apps could be
> > compiled in a couple of weeks?
>
> How is it an improvement over the existing tools? I must be missing
> something, because it sounds to me like you are merely asking that
> there be more ports made available as packages than are now offered.

I think what you're missing is the suggestion to bundle a set of pre-built 
packages with a snapshot of the ports tree used to build them. Currently it's 
difficult to mix and match packages and ports because the versions of 
dependencies are likely to differ between the package and the local version 
of the ports tree. If you know you have the same ports tree your packages 
were built from, you can much more easily combine pre-built packages and 
local builds from source.

This has clear advantages. At the moment, unless you're very lucky with your 
timing, you tend to find that as soon as you want to build one port from 
source (perhaps to fiddle with the configuration) you have to stop using 
prebuilt packages altogether.

The drawback I can see is the disk space required to keep several generations 
of packages online - if the package-port bundle is rebuilt every three weeks, 
let's say, and you want to keep 6 months' worth of packages online, you need 
to keep 9 complete versions available.

Chris's suggestion is certainly more than just a request for more packages, 
though.

Jonathan