Official FreeBSD Binary Packages now available for pkgng

[Matthew Seaman]

On 31/10/2013 06:22, Net Ground - Frederique Rijsdijk wrote:
> Question: I see for instance that php52, apache is off. For php53
> it's on. php54 and php5 are not there at all. None of the php's seem
> to be compiled with php-fpm. What if I'd like threaded perl? How are
> the make options defined? Are they always the 'default' ?

The official packages are always compiled with the default sets of
package options.  This is quite contentious in the case of PHP as there
are two popular ways of deploying PHP (ie. as an Apache module or as an
FCGI process) which aren't always enabled by default.

There is a long term plan to fix this, which is to implement
sub-packages.  ie. creating several different packages from one stage
directory.   So eventually there should be 'php5-apache-mod-php' or
'php5-fpm' sub-packages.

Needless to say, introducing sub-packages depends on the stagedir
conversion being essentially complete.  IIRC it might be compatible with
pkg_tools, but pkg(8) will definitely be preferred when dealing with
sub-packages.

Missing packages on pkg.freebsd.org are frequently due to a higher level
dependency failing to compile properly.  Unfortunately the failure of a
package that many others depend upon can have a disproportionate effect
on what packages are finally available.
The ports is currently in the best shape it has ever been in terms of
being able to generate as full a set of binary packages as possible, but
there's still more improvement to come.  It's also early days in
managing pkg.freebsd.org -- no doubt with experience techniques and
practices will be learned in order to maximize the pkg yeild.

> What if I'd like to run perl 5.18 in stead of 5.14? These are
> probably the latest 'default' versions?

Default version of perl right now is lang/perl5.16.  If you want to use
lang/perl5.18 instead, your best bet is still to build your own package
sets, using poudriere, or otherwise.  In principle it should be possible
for you to build just perl5.18 and any ports depending on perl that you
require, and then source any other packages from the official
repositories.  It will be interesting to hear how well that works in
practice.  It should work pretty well, but I can see there are some
pitfalls that you might fall into.

> These are just examples, I'm sure there are alot more.

Yes.  This is just one step on the way to bringing the ports up to the
current state of the art and finally making binary packages a viable
choice for maintaining FreeBSD systems.

> Are you using poudriere to build the packages?

Yes they are.  Exactly the same as is available in the ports -- which is
another positive step.  Formerly the package building clusters used a
hacked up version of something distantly related to tinderbox, but the
code used on the build cluster wasn't publically available, so didn't
get the sort of widespread scrutiny and debugging that you get from a
larger userbase.

	Cheers,

	Matthew

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey


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