Distribute FreeBSD via packages instead of "global" tarballs

[Florent Peterschmitt]

Le 13/07/2013 19:00, Matthew Seaman a écrit :
> On 13/07/2013 15:36, Florent Peterschmitt wrote:
>> Is it possible to package FreeBSD distribution under little packages,
>> aiming easy and small upgrades ?
>>
>> Or this has already been thought ?
> 
> This is certainly technically possible, and it's something there's been
> occasional speculation about; but as far as I know, no one has yet come
> up with a demonstration setup.
> 
> There are a number of practical problems that would need sorting out --
> 
>    * pkg isn't part of the base system -- by design -- which makes it
>      tricky to use to register installing base system components on a
>      bare metal system.

But it will be in FreeBSD 10 ?

>    * Similarly, pkg pretty much ignores the facilities and shared
>      libraries from base when calculating dependencies and so forth for
>      ports.  If base is pkg-ised, should that still be the case?

Hum. It will be a lot of work to turn the base system in a port-like
way. Maybe it would be simpler to have some "diff" packages, a bit like
freebsd-update does but with pkg.

>    * Given that the base system is divided up into numerous smaller
>      packages, should those packages be registered in the same database
>      as is used for ports? (ie. /var/db/pkg/local.sqlite)

Certainly not. If an rm -rf /usr/local/* /var/db/pkg/local.sqlite can
clean up the system of every third-party software, base components
doesn't have their place with them. *BSD always separate base from the
rest, why this should change here ?

> Packaging the base system is an idea that has been floating around for a
> long time -- since long before pkg was conceived, certainly.  But it has
> never really gone anywhere.  Using pkg for the job would have some
> advantages over trying to do the same thing with the old pkg_tools, but
> would it ultimately be competitive with the way the installation media
> works now or to freebsd-update(8)?

In never used freebsd-update between more than one version. For examble
I never tried going from 8.0 to 9.1. I let me told that freebsd-update
must go through each version to finally upgrade to the version we want.
If that's true, packaging the base would avoid this behavior, make thing
simpler for users (of course not for packaging :-) ) and surely faster.

> 	Cheers,
> 
> 	Matthew



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Florent Peterschmitt           | Please:
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