Re: what does you think of fink?

[Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dan Melomedman wrote:
> > 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.

I think that was one of the goals when Matt added support for "variant 
symlinks".

Of course, the FreeBSD ports tree does not support different versions of
packages at all (other than as kludges like "tcl83" and "tcl84" in 
separate subdirectories).  So any sane packaging system will probably have 
to break away from the ports tree in a major way.  But that then raises the
question of how to maintain an incompatible ports tree: FreeBSD and Debian 
use their large userbase to contribute ports and packages (again, the 
process is much more streamlined in Debian in my opinion), DragonFly is 
unlikely to have such a large userbase for quite a while.

Rahul