Re: what does you think of fink?

[Dan Melomedman <dan@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Rahul Siddharthan wrote:
> Dan Melomedman said on Dec 17, 2003 at 20:37:22:
> > > Is there any other presently available pakaging system that is easier 
> > > and more reliable to use than fink?
> > > 
> > > http://fink.sourceforge.net/
> > 
> > Not directly related, but this is also an interesting and simple way to
> > organize packages and avoid collisions (perhaps too radical for most
> > people, but it did gain a small community of packagers):
> > 
> > http://cr.yp.to/slashpackage.html
> > 
> > http://cr.yp.to/slashcommand.html
> 
> How does it take care of dependency tracking?  That's really the main
> issue with packaging.
> 
> http://cr.yp.to/slashpackage/management.html 
> says nothing about dependencies, upgrading dependencies without

Good point, but slashpackage makes collision control and versioning very
easy, not to mention a very easy to work with database - the filesystem.
Seems simple, but people still can't get those two things right, even
with most advanced package systems.

Dependency control is a hairy feature, but I am sure it can be built on
top. The system is very simple.

> So far the best solution I've seen is debian's apt.  FreeBSD's ports
> can break quite seriously (and can't handle multiple versions well);

But slashpackage was designed to easily handle versions well. Something
that most package systems still can't get right.

> portupgrade alleviates the problem but at the cost of sometimes having
> to recompile almost your entire system when, say, gettext or libpng
> undergoes an incompatible upgrade.

With slashpackage an administrator doesn't need to remove an old version
of the package, different versions can happily coexist since packages
are self-contained, and selection is done with symlinks. Can't get
easier than that.

So if the new ports system will exhibit just those two features, many
sysadmins will breathe a sigh of relief.