Re: My personal pkgsrc FAQ

[Robert Luciani <rluciani@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Another thought I had for some time: Pkg_radd uses the
> http://pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org/All redirection if I remember correctly.
> Can't we have a version number in the /All redirection mechanism so that
> we can have different pkg_radd's (HEAD, release, etc.) use different
> sets of packages?

We need 2 package sets.

The first one, the system default PKG_PATH, would be based on a stable set which
gets rebuilt only for every DragonFly release (like the upcoming DF 2.2). For
this, using a quarterly release is most appropriate because it would allow for
security updates to be added to the package set without worries of dependency
problems from other random updated packages. Is this something that you could
oversee, Justin?

The second package set would be based on the current pkgsrc. I volunteer for
this task and am willing to spend the time to get it working reliably and with
updates in a timely fashion. The package set would need to be rebuilt  _at
least_ every other week, but hopefully more than once a week depending on
whether my machine can handle bi-weekly updates. I'm going to set up a vkernel
for this which would just run all day, and try to get the process as automated
as possible.

I'm wondering though, if it would be more prudent send the built packages
straight to chlamydia and let them propagate from there, or if the updates are
small enough when done frequently that they should be uploaded to Matt's pkgbox?

Either way, to switch from the stable to the current repository one would simply
point PKG_PATH to http://pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org/packages/current to start
grabbing new packages.

After installing the packages comes the question of keeping them up to date.
Something reliable, autonomous, that uses binaries, and works does not really
exist for pkgsrc as far as I know. There is however a rudimentary program,
pkgtools/pkg_chk, which _almost_ works. It seems to detect packages that need
updating correctly when checking against an updated /usr/pkgsrc but when
checking against a URL like (for instance):
qqqqhttp://pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org/packages/DragonFly-2.0/pkgsrc-current/All/
it gets confused like:
www/apache2 - apache-2.0.63nb4 < apache-2.0.63nb2 (binary package available)
or
databases/php-pgsql - php4-pgsql-4.4.9nb1 missing (binary package available)
even though I have php5-pgsql-5.2.6nb1 installed. But it comes pretty close. If
this program worked we'd almost have a usable package system! I'd appreciate it
if someone wants to take a peek at it, otherwise I'll check it out during the
holiday break.

:)

-- 
Robert Luciani
Chalmers University of Technology, SWE
Department of Computer Science and Engineering
http://www.rluciani.com/rluciani.asc