Date: Mon, 25 Apr 2016 09:18:02 -0700 From: Kevin Oberman <rkoberman@gmail.com> To: David Chisnall <theraven@freebsd.org> Cc: =?UTF-8?B?R2Vycml0IEvDvGhu?= <gerrit.kuehn@aei.mpg.de>, FreeBSD Current <freebsd-current@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: why 100 packages are evil Message-ID: <CAN6yY1v2xmJDnbKuQq67F5S5OBQ1xnSSB6RRMRBG=nVRZ5coSQ@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <417F35C8-02A3-409E-9ABE-C4803B656862@FreeBSD.org> References: <E1asbZj-0003Ra-Qs@rmm6prod02.runbox.com> <76093.1461096570@critter.freebsd.dk> <5716AD65.8070007@shrew.net> <BF66EA01-E073-45F0-8F9E-22D57E8871B0@bsdimp.com> <5716FA70.4080604@freebsd.org> <57170E5D.1090701@freebsd.org> <5524F499-5042-407E-9180-43D15A53F3F0@FreeBSD.org> <7621BDAB-A409-456A-A3F1-A6CD9B371DBC@rdsor.ro> <20160420094806.GJ6614@zxy.spb.ru> <7c84f388-21dc-419f-70ce-c5369e294dab@freebsd.org> <alpine.OSX.2.00.1604222009300.15755@minnie.bitsea.ca> <34743.1461428396@critter.freebsd.dk> <571BB660.1070107@FreeBSD.org> <20160425074825.02a3b1409429ef916881ba46@aei.mpg.de> <417F35C8-02A3-409E-9ABE-C4803B656862@FreeBSD.org>
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On Mon, Apr 25, 2016 at 1:22 AM, David Chisnall <theraven@freebsd.org> wrote: > On 25 Apr 2016, at 06:48, Gerrit K=C3=BChn <gerrit.kuehn@aei.mpg.de> wrot= e: > > > >> Yes. It will be replaced by 'pkg upgrade' -- as far as I know, that's > >> the plan for 11.0-RELEASE. > > > > Hm... I never had any troubles with freebsd-update, it always "just > > worked" for me. OTOH, I remember having several issues with pkg, > requiring > > to fix databases manually and so on. > > There are two kinds of issues with freebsd-update: > > The first is fairly common: it=E2=80=99s slow and creates a lot of files.= If you > read the forums, you=E2=80=99ll find a lot of issues about this. Updates= from one > patchlevel to the next are pretty straightforward, but on both the VMs th= at > I use for FreeBSD and a slow AMD machine with ZFS it takes around an hour > (sometimes more) for freebsd-update to jump one major release. After tha= t, > it takes pkg a minute or two to update the 2-3GB of packages that need > upgrading. Minor releases can often take tens of minutes on these system= . > > The many files issue can cause inode exhaustion. One one machine, I just > checked and have 20K files in /var/db/freebsd-update/files. If you=E2=80= =99re > using UFS for /var, it=E2=80=99s fairly easy for freebsd-update to run ou= t of > inodes. Trying to recover a FreeBSD system that can no longer create fil= es > in /var is not the most fun uses of my time. > > The second issue is that it sometimes just fails to work. I have twice > had freebsd-update manage to become confused about versions and install a > kernel that couldn=E2=80=99t read the filesystem. I=E2=80=99ve had simil= ar confusion where > (on a box that I administer mostly via the network and where physical > access is a pain) had it install a version of ifconfig from an older > userland than the kernel. These are all on machines where freebsd-update > has been responsible for every upgrade after the initial install from CD. > Most depressingly, it spends ages doing checksums of every file in the > system, determines that they don=E2=80=99t match the expected ones, and t= hen > installs the wrong one anyway. > > I have been using the testing versions of pkg on most FreeBSD machines > since it became available. Since pkg 1.0 was released, I have had far > fewer issues with pkg than with freebsd-update and almost all of those we= re > to do with poor information in the ports tree and the rest were either UI > or performance issues. We have a lot tighter control over the packaging > metadata for the base system. > > David > I have to agree with this. freebsd-update works pretty well. I have only been burned by it once. (The same ifconfig issue.) I had a number of issues, none disastrous, but painful to fix, with pkg in the early days. Some were probably PBCAK due to lack of familiarity with the tool. Others were bugs in early versions. Since 1.3 came out, I have had no problems at all with pkg other than packages that were not available due to vulnerabilities. Most were either linux-c6 packages (which never sent o get fixed) and ports depending on ffmpeg that include a specific ffmpeg distribution. At this point, I am quite comfortable with the idea of using pkg for the base system, though I will be very, very nervous about it for a while. -- Kevin Oberman, Part time kid herder and retired Network Engineer E-mail: rkoberman@gmail.com PGP Fingerprint: D03FB98AFA78E3B78C1694B318AB39EF1B055683
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