future of packages?

[Baptiste Daroussin]

On Wed, Oct 10, 2012 at 12:17:23AM +0200, Patrick Lamaiziere wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I have to say that I'm convinced that pkg and packages is the way
> to go. It is nice to have a package manager (pkg is a wonderfull
> tool), but without package, such tool is a bit useless...
> 
> So which packages? IMO packages should be consistent (by example if we
> support ipv6, all packages should have "ipv6 on" option). But this is
> also true for, by example ldap: should we provide ldap authentifcation
> by default? (IMO yes since FreeBSD targets servers). 
> 
> A "generic" packages set also means that a lot of things (into
> packages) will be useless (I'm sure some pleople will complain). But it
> will be the cost to use packages.
> 
> IMO it will take a lot a time to have a consistent options set for our
> packages. It could be a bit premature, but I will be to happy to ear
> about how packages and packages options will be handle in the future.

Lot's of things are possible:
1/ with pkgng 2.0 we expect to be able to get provides/requires features,
which could help a lot having packages build with
different options and no dependency problem (can be seen as kindof flavours)

2/ an other direction, would be to be able to split packages: aka one port to
provide multiple packages, most (not all) of the time the options in ports are
only there to add files/libs or not into a package if we can split packages then
we can drastically reduce the number of options

3/ sane package splitting, I know there is a lot of people that will not be
happy with the next, but being able to split packages into runtime vs
development part for example can help a lot, for example, allowing having
packages depending on mysql41 runtime libraries and mysql42 runtime libraries
install at the same time with no conflicts, lots of different version of same
libraries conflicts just because they are pulling the same developpement files,
which end-users don't care about.

regards,
Bapt


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