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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