Create empty package catalog (feature request)

[Rick Miller]

On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 8:25 AM, Matthew Seaman <matthew at freebsd.org> wrote:

> On 11/24/14 13:14, Rick Miller wrote:
> > Is it feasible to add a feature/command line argument to `pkg` permitting
> > the creation of an empty package catalog?
>
> What's the use-case for that?


In a nutshell...

On the client-side, pkg(8) enforces uniqueness of packages within a single
repo introducing a scenario where multiple versions of the same package,
while the server can and does include these in the repo catalog, is
unsupported in a single repo.  Consider, however, that a project has
explicit dependancies on a previous version of a particular package.  `pkg
install` consistently chooses the most recent version of a package where
the catalog has multiple occurrences of it.

A system consisting of consistent, yet limited quantity of package repos
implementing an algorithm to select a repo where to distribute newly
published packages was deployed.  Target clients are pre-configured with
this repo set permitting them to specify a particular version of a
package.  While working around the above limitation, it causes an error on
the client when encountering an empty repo citing:

pkg: http://hostname.domain.com/repo_mirror/bsd-qa-local-repo8/meta.txz:
Not Found
pkg: repository bsd-qa-local-repo8 has no meta file, using default settings

It's much more involved than this, however, and in the interest of brevity,
I attempted to describe it concisely.

-- 
Take care
Rick Miller