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Date:      Mon, 29 Apr 2019 16:50:00 -0400
From:      Garrett Wollman <wollman@csail.mit.edu>
To:        Cy Schubert <Cy.Schubert@cschubert.com>
Cc:        freebsd-pkgbase@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: CFT: FreeBSD Package Base
Message-ID:  <23751.25464.908633.101215@khavrinen.csail.mit.edu>
In-Reply-To: <201904291931.x3TJV73d079802@slippy.cwsent.com>
References:  <freebsd-rwg@gndrsh.dnsmgr.net> <201904291441.x3TEfMid072751@gndrsh.dnsmgr.net> <201904291931.x3TJV73d079802@slippy.cwsent.com>

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<<On Mon, 29 Apr 2019 12:31:07 -0700, Cy Schubert <Cy.Schubert@cschubert.com> said:

> The discussion about granularity begs the question, why pkgbase in the 
> first place? My impression was that it allowed people to select which 
> components they wanted to either create a lean installation or mix and 
> match base packages and ports (possibly with flavours to install in 
> /usr rather than $LOCALBASE) such that maybe person A wanted a stock 
> install while person B wanted to replace, picking a random example, BSD 
> tar with GNU tar. Isn't that the real advantage of pkgbase?

No.  The "real" advantage of pkgbase is that it allows the distributor
of a customized version of the operating system to support binary-only
updates, without all the (non-trivial) infrastructure of running a
custom FreeBSD-update builder and distribution server.

Consider my position: I have about 30 servers (and another ~10 jails)
that all run the same local build of FreeBSD.  Right now, the only
reliable way to update them is to NFS-mount /usr/src and /usr/obj from
my build server, and run a (slow) "make installworld".  It would
literally save me hours out of every upgrade (or base-system security
fix) to be able to install compressed binary packages downloaded over
http, and I'd have better security because binary packages are
signed.

For my use case, I don't much care what the granularity is, so long as
I can safely upgrade (or update) the kernel independently of the
userland and independently of third-party packages -- just two
packages (kernel and userland) would suffice, although I'd probably
prefer the runtime libraries to be in a separate package just for
safety.

I'm not distributing packages to third parties, I just want to be able
to install and upgrade my packages on my fleet of servers and jails
quickly and safely.  This is not the entirety of the use cases the
project as a whole needs to support, but it's a major *end-user* use
case.  (And I've said as much in various surveys.)

-GAWollman




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