pkg_add for 5.2.1 no longer working...

[Kris Kennaway]

On Mon, Feb 21, 2005 at 04:17:02AM +0000, Darryl L. Miles wrote:

> I notice from current discussion that perl (for example) is now a port 
> and being moved into /usr/local, what I regard as vendor supplied 
> packages do not belong in /usr/local but in the main tree.  Vendor 
> supplier 'ls' and vendor supplied 'perl' should be together.  
> Administrator personally built tool should go into /usr/local.  I 
> completely understand perl being an add-in component, I fully support 
> the "perl is optional" part of the initiative.

It's OK for you to have a different opinion, but you need to
understand that that's not how it's done in FreeBSD.

If you want to compile software from the ports collection instead of
using precompiled packages, you can put it elsewhere by setting the
PREFIX/LOCALBASE/X11BASE variables (see ports(7)).  Some ports may not
respect these environment variables, but these are bugs and you should
submit a PR for any that you find.  Unfortunately you can't use
packages in a nonstandard location because many of them need to
hard-code paths in the binaries, so you can't change the install
location at install-time.

> Yes I understand that all the packages for 5.3 have to be rebuilt, but 
> this does not have any bearing on the availability of the already 
> existing packages for the previous release, I'm saying they should be 
> frozen and marked up as superceeded (by some never package version).  
> That never version has a dependacy on 5.3-RELEASE being installed.  Then 
> everyone can be happy ?

You missed the point that the reason they were removed from the main
ftp site is because that site doesn't have an infinite amount of free
space, not because we like to inconvenience users of old releases.

> >But the key is your use of 'mainline release': 5.2.1 was never intended
> >to be a 'mainline release', it was always a 'technology preview'.  The
> >previous 'mainline release' is really 4.11 and it still has packages
> >available for it and will continue to in the medium-term.
> > 
> >
> First impressions of the uname -a output with the word "-RELEASE" give 
> me the impression something has been cast into stone (for a while at 
> least).  Cisco routers used to use the kind of release types you're 
> using, like Engineering Release / Maintainence Release and this would 
> head all announcement, release notes and PR info when discussing that 
> specific version.  Maybe -PREVIEW or -RELEASECANDIDATE or -UNSTABLE or 
> -ALPHA would be clearer to people like me.

No, it's a release, but it's not a release on a -STABLE branch.
Again, FreeBSD has very specific traditions and definitions here,
which you might not understand or agree with, but they're
well-established and you can read more about them in the FreeBSD
Handbook.

Kris

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