A lot of pkg problems

[William A. Mahaffey III]

On 09/16/14 16:16, Warren Block wrote:
> On Tue, 16 Sep 2014, William A. Mahaffey III wrote:
>
>> I have posted a fair amount of questions/issues w/ pkg as well. I 
>> think most of the problems are with documentation. The interactions 
>> between ports & pkgs as managed by pkg are not necessarily intuitive, 
>> & *ALL* documentation (man pages, 'pkg help ....', & online docs) are 
>> mum on that matter. There are some files/metadata/etc. that 
>> apparently are used by both packages (ports & pkg), & it is 
>> maddeningly easy to run afoul of those interactions, at least for me. 
>> I have boiled it down to 'always do whatever you are going to do w/ 
>> pkg *1st*, then mess w/ ports' .... That is working for me, but my 
>> setup is pretty simplistic .... YMMV, IANAL, & all that rot ....
>
> There is a simple misunderstanding here.  A package is just the binary 
> version of a port.  When a port is compiled and installed, it is 
> really creating a package and installing that.
>
> pkg is a tracking system.  The packages can be built from ports or 
> downloaded as pre-built packages.  Mixing both is not generally 
> recommended.
>
> The amount of time people are willing to invest in "saving time" with 
> packages is interesting.  In many cases, they could have built from 
> ports and been done quicker overall, or at least with less user 
> involvement.
>


I try fervently not to mix them, but often the online (freebsd.org) docs 
recommend doing something through ports which could be done w/ pkg 
instead. I have slavishly followed some of those recommendations & had a 
5+ hour compile session ensue (I'm on a somewhat meager machine, 1.3 GHz 
AMD quad-core jaguar based), when I (think I) could have installed the 
pkg (which was available) in a couple of mins. But that isn't the big 
issue for me, it has been the fact that doing some portmaster or ports 
commands then preclude pkg from upgrading packages. I like the system 
overall, mind you, but as a noob, getting spun up on the intricacies of 
ports/pkg has been a bit of a challenge. I try to use pkg exclusively 
(I'm with Radel on that point), but I need/want flash browser support 
(I'm still awaiting the flash port to get working on 9.3), so some ports 
is unavoidable for me .... Probably more noise than necessary, since I 
am overall happy w/ FBSD ....


-- 

	William A. Mahaffey III

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