Re: Compatability with FreeBSD Ports [debian package tools]

[Hiten Pandya <hmp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 04:26:21PM +0100, Hiten Pandya wrote:
>
> > One of the only reason why I am still holding onto pkgsrc is because it 
> > has (atleast) some support for views or shall I say isolated installations 
> > of same package but different version; apart from that pkgsrc has no 
> > overall advantage over FreeBSD ports.
>
>
> There are a lot of small things I came to love over the time, e.g.
> support for shlock, (b)make package also building the packages of its
> dependencies (that'S IMO the most annoying thing in ports). I think that
> the option framework is much better implemented than ports', though it
> would be nice to have a dialog sometimes. Overall, I found it more
> annyoing in ports though, partly also because defining BATCH has other
> side-effects too.
>
> Joerg

Semantical differences, at best, lets be honest.  They really do not 
affect the bigger picture all that much and if they do, I would like to 
hear about them.

Secondly, when you say the "option framework" is better built then ports, 
please substantiate and elaborate on your claim.

If pkgsrc was to be used for solving the BUILD domain of the problem, it 
wouldn't be so bad at all, but I think it is NO GOOD at solving the issues 
with binary packages.

One more time I am saying this, handling of binary package management is 
still an issue that we need to sort out.  As I have outlined in one of my 
mails the best solution to this would be hybrid, i.e. using pkgsrc to 
build binary packages and using DPKG/APT* for handling those binary 
packages for the end user, including dependency handling, blah blah, list 
goes on.

Any issues we encounter with DPKG or APT, we will just have to sort them 
out as we go along, but atleast we will be choosing something that has got 
quite near to solving most of them.  Not to mention there are GUIs out 
there for managing APT based package system, and also there is the Smart 
Package Manager, an interesting add-on option, effectively.

				Hiten Pandya
				hmp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx