Re: Compatability with FreeBSD Ports [debian package tools]

[Michel Talon <talon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Raphaël Marmier wrote:

> This would answer the needs expressed many time in an acceptable  
> compromise:
> - upgrading an app without breaking another in the process
> - able to install multiple versions of a package
> - allow piecemeal upgrades
> - allow updating a single package
> - you can have several admins each concentrating on his stuff without  
> the fear of breaking the colleague's stuff.
> - piece of mind

Let me add that this sytem is precisely the system advocated by Apple
and by PC-BSD, and that PC-BSD seems to be very well received at least 
by the newbie part of the community (http://distrowatch.com/), which is 
very important. In fact the various experiences - Debian, FreeBSD, 
NetBSD, etc.- show that package management systems create more problems 
that they solve. For instance in the Debian case, the requirement of a
fully working system directly causes extreme stagnation. One of the aims
of many package management systems is to "clean" the hard disk of old 
cruft and so on. Nothing is more costly at the end that this stupid goal
of economizing something which is basically gratis (hard disk space).
For me it is one of the redeeming features of portupgrade that is keeps 
stuff under compat, instead of throwing it away like a direct make in 
the ports tree. I thought it was one of the goals of Dfly to introduce
vfs magic precisely to be able to do that, to have several coexisting 
versions of the same soft, etc. without trouble. this is why i am a 
little surprised by all these discussions about pkgsrc, etc.