Create empty package catalog (feature request)

[Matthew Seaman]

On 11/24/14 14:15, Rick Miller wrote:
> 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:

Have you tested pkg-devel with this scenario?  There's a bug solved in
1.4.x to do with pkg(8) not applying any sort of preference ordering to
repositories.

> 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.
> 

So what you'ld really like is to have multiple different versions of the
same package in the same repo, and have pkg(8) able to select the
appropriate version based on the explicit dependencies you state?

Having a facility to avoid some package versions is something that would
be generally useful.  At the moment we're just replicated the ports
behaviour, which is to use the latest available version.

	Cheers,

	Matthew