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Date:      Sun, 25 Jun 1995 01:19:15 +0100
From:      "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@freebsd.org>
To:        ports@freebsd.org
Subject:   To speak of ports and packages, cabbages and kings.
Message-ID:  <4162.804039555@whisker.internet-eireann.ie>

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I've gone on record many times as saying that:

	1. I hated pkg_* and considered those tools a one-week hack and
	   transitional tools at best until I re-wrote them all from
	   scratch (last time I'll say THAT!).

	2. I'd never touch the pkg_* tools again.

Well, here we are some 2 years later and I haven't re-written the
package tools from scratch, nor have I managed to keep my hands off
the bloody things.  Foo!  And fortran will be dead any day now, I
suppose.

Anyway, I'm writing this little diatribe in order to make both a
suggestion and a plea.

First, the suggestions:

We (read: anyone but me :) need to seriously consider some sort of
PKG_PATH mechanism for adding packages.  If one does a:

	pkg_add /cdrom/packages/networking/tcl-dp-3.2.tgz

Then it will fail to find the tcl-7.3.tgz and tk-3.6.tgz package
dependencies in /cdrom/packages/languages/tcl-7.3.tgz and
/cdrom/packages/x11/tk-3.6.tgz since it only looks in the current
directory for the dependency.  Yuck.  This will generate a LOT of tech
support!

The same goes for DISTFILES, which I've been pleading with Satoshi for
some time to make a proper path out of so that you can have local,
group and global "distfile repositories" for the system to search
through.  This would be especially helpful for CDROM since it means I
can set /cdrom/packages/DISTFILES first in my path and it will get
things from there up until such a time as the port outdates the copy
on the CDROM.

Finally, a lot of people have been asking for pkg_add to support
fetch-by-ftp directly, something that wouldn't be TOO hard to do but
will take some thought (and I haven't too many of those to spare just
now :).  I did write a quick hack for this awhile back but it should
be taken back out as I'd prefer to simply nuke the libftp library
altogether - it doesn't support passive mode ftp and is otherwise kind
of a pain to work with.

Poul-Henning Kamp wrote a much smaller ftp "mini-library" that's in
/usr/src/release/sysinstall/ftp.c and which supports both active and
passive mode ftp.  It would be a fine choice to use for something like
this, assuming you can find some canonical place to look for packages
(and make it work the same as the PKG_PATH stuff).  Maybe a PKG_HOSTS
list?

Any takers?  Pleeeeze?  Whine.. :-)

Anyway, that's the suggestions.  Now the plea:

Would anyone care to re-write this stuff from scratch? :-}

We really need a more robust set of pkg extraction tools and I'd be
more than happy to rattle off a list of grievances against this set if
anyone wonders why I'm so keen to have them taken out and shot (though
somehow I don't suspect that I need to - the list of other people's
grievances is already pretty long :-).  I *know* that there's someone
out there who is just itching to become a Package Hero and just
doesn't know it yet.. :-) Seriously, we could have a _really good_
package system with index files and proper dependencies and the whole
lot, it just needs to be someone other than me that writes it.  I'm
well and truly SICK of packaging at this point and am really not the
man to do it, though I'll be perfectly happy to "mentor" someone else
through the process.

Any takers?  Double pleeeze?  Double whine? :-)

					Jordan






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