[FreeBSD-Ports-Announce] Time to bid farewell to the old pkg_ tools

[Matthew Seaman]

On 03/02/2014 21:24, Julian H. Stacey wrote:
>> be beneficial in a very short amount of time.  Even if you prefer to
>> compile from source,
> 
> I use source, rarely if ever use packages, (except pkg_delete
> to remove old broken dependencies). No opinion which scrips are better.
> 
> 
>> you will still reap the benefits of the modern
>> packaging system.
> 
> In 10.0 FreeBSD `reaped the benefit` of a default new horrible
> registry that smells like Microsoft with quasi binary local.sqlite
> needing special tools.  (Yes I know there's an export function.)
> 
> For 2 decade we've poured scorn on Microsoft & its opaque easily
> damaged hard to access registry, & lauded how with FreeBSD we can
> examine & manipulate & repair our text based equivalent with any
> number of personal choice text tools, & now FreeSBD is burdened by
> this horrible Microsoft style registry.

You're being absurd.  local.sqlite is nothing like the Microsoft
registry[*].  It's a database of all the files etc. that are managed
through the ports system.  No more, no less.

All we have done is replace an unreliable collection of text files --
hard to keep consistent, impossible to update in an atomic fashion and
woefully pessimal for certain quite legitimate queries -- with a RDBMS,
which quite neatly disposes of those problems.  No, it isn't ascii text
which you can grep through.  It's a set of relational tables, which you
can query using SQL.  And that is a deal more powerful in many ways than
grep, but not so familiar to most; so we've provided a scripting
interface in the form pf pkg-query(8).

Do you complain because ZFS doesn't have it's configuration data in some
ascii text files?  How about procstat(8)? Or ld.so(1)/ldconfig(8)?

Truth is, unix has always adopted a pragmatic approach to system data
and stored it in whatever form would be most effective.  In our case,
we're pretty clear that a relational database is streaks ahead of a
directory tree full of text files.

	Cheers,

	Matthew

[*] Quite apart from anything else, a corrupt local.sqlite doesn't make
one iota of difference to the operational effectiveness of your system.
 All it means is you've lost track of what port installed what file.

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


-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 1036 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ports/attachments/20140203/fa905a1e/attachment.sig>