New packaging approach

[doug]

On Sun, 10 Dec 2017, Baho Utot wrote:

> On 12/10/2017 12:33 AM, DTD wrote:
>> 
>> On Sat, 9 Dec 2017, Polytropon wrote:
>> 
>>> However, I am not sure how the new packaging approach will handle this. As 
>>> you might have read, pkg will be used for installing and upgrading OS 
>>> files in the future, so there will not be the big difference 
>>> "freebsd-update" and "pkg update" / "pkg upgrade".
>> 
>> Where can I read about this? If this leads to dependency issues similar to 
>> those encountered with desktops, my reaction is more of 'oh s--t' rather 
>> then 'oh boy'. Back to the days when the odd or even versions numbers were 
>> for those of us (read me) who do not track Stable for similar reasons.
>> 
>
> The way the packaging of base is currently being done will*guarantee a great 
> level of OH SHIT.

First, I will qualify my comments by saying I am an end user. I did take Kurt 
McKusick's internals course a decade or so ago. Never ended up going anywhere 
with C but it was/is a good way to understand the workings and to be a better 
sysadmin. My experience with FreeBSD is that once release engineering was fully 
integrated into the upgrade process in the 4.x's, maybe the version 5 era 
(memory goes shortly after the tolerance for coding 12 hrs/day) I have never had 
any issues through cvsup, Subversion, and freebsd-update. If you follow the 
releases, they work. Maybe if you are developing a port or are a contributor to 
the base, things are not so rosy. But here in userland things are better managed 
than IBM did with MFT, MVT into MVS. I'm pretty sure those guys got paid pretty 
well and did not have to have a day job to do what they really wanted to.

That's a really wordy way to say I disagree with the idea that development of 
the base OS has been mis-handled. In server-land since 4.5 no gotcha's here (as 
a keeper of servers). Things are a bit rougher if you want to run a FreeBSD 
workstation. On my current desktop I have gimp, libre office and my window 
manager of choice. 613 packages and items built from ports. The pkg frame-work 
is much improved over the old pkg_add et all. However, the number of 
combinations of {613,n} where n is the number of shared libraries, dynamic and 
static is a large number (finite but unbounded). And all involved have to get 
all the dependencies right to have zero problems.

My concern is, if it works don't fix it. And, if you must, I would like to start 
getting up to speed on it ASAP. I have access to every freebsd list but have not 
found a discussion of this. My only request is to be pointed to where I can 
follow the discussion.