User and vendor packages (for pkg_* tools)

[Mark Felder]

On Wed, Oct 1, 2014, at 10:25, Matthew Seaman wrote:
> On 10/01/14 13:33, Mark Felder wrote:
> > On Wed, Oct 1, 2014, at 07:15, Boris Samorodov wrote:
> >> > Hi All,
> >> > 
> >> > A user has License to use an App and uses pkgng. The vendor has
> >> > only packages for pkg_* tools.
> >> > 
> >> > What the user should do? Is there a tool to convert old packages to
> >> > new format?
> >> > 
> > There is no such tool. You would have to manually convert it to the new
> > package format by making a port for it. I think a skeleton port that
> > asked the user a few questions could do this automatically. I will
> > consider taking a stab at this, but I will have to locate an example to
> > test with.
> 
> Actually there kind-of is such a tool.  pkg-convert(8)
> 
> It's not ideal, in that you have to install the old-style package
> *before* converting it.  Making pkg-convert able to read either old- or
> new- style package tarballs and output to the alternate format tarball
> would be an interesting project.
> 

You can't install the old-style package if you don't have pkg_tools.
They were also removed from the ports tree. This is now a wild goose
chase if you aren't on an OS that natively came with pkg_tools. If a
vendor supplied an old pkg that would run fine on FreeBSD 10 with
compat4x and you want to run on a modern kernel/OS this is now a very
high learning curve. I hope we can fix this in the near future.