Re: Package download statistics

[John Marino <dragonflybsd@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 6/3/2013 14:48, Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
> On Sun, 2 Jun 2013, John Marino wrote:
>
>> Except you can't mix these systems.
>
> This is misleading. If pkgsrc does not work when dports is used, then it
> is a bug and should be fixed. Pkgsrc is designed to work when other
> software is installed.

I've been saying consistently that dports is to blame for this.   Pkgsrc 
is behaving itself perfectly.  Dports, however, does not yet have an 
equivalent of buildlink3 or DESTDIR and as such it is finding pkgsrc 
libraries and tools in it's build path.

Pkgsrc plays nicely with others; dports doesn't.


> And if some are already using pkgsrc (with their required packages
> already installed), why would they need to download more packages
> frequently? Comparing a short time (few months or less) with dports
> doesn't make sense when one suggests new packages to be downloaded.

Theoretically the pkgsrc binary users are "stuck" on a version until a 
new branch is built which normally coincides with a new release.  We'd 
expect to see a flurry of replacements at this time, except that 
replacing the packages doesn't go smoothly.

The other main difference is how the packages are delivered.  Pkgsrc is 
on quarterly branches.  Dports has two flavors, "RELEASE" (which is 
static like a branch) and "LATEST" which is updated about every 30 days. 
  And the updates are around 10,000 packages at least, so it's a big 
deal.  The users will take advantage of this since it's so 
straightforward and normally painless to update them.


> Is there an audience of pkgsrc users that use pkgin?

I have an interest due to my use of Solaris/OmniOS etc.  Unfortunately I 
couldn't build it from scratch due to some bugs that don't show on other 
systems.  nih was even more unbuildable.  I really wanted to try it but 
so far I haven't.  I wanted to avoid rolling replace.

> What benefit does pkg provide over pkgin?

Others with more experience can probably give a more fair answer.  From 
what I can tell, package update / replacement is far superior.  The 
all-in-one aspect is fast and polished but based on my recent discussion 
on tech-pkg it's really a different beast (e.g. not a wrapper for the 
pkg_* like pkgin and nih are)

> Also when I attended the poudiere presentation at BSDCan a couple weeks
> ago, I heard mention of ZFS requirement. I am curious if that was
> replaced with hammer equivalents?

My guess is that you were listening to a poudriere presentation.  ZFS is 
no longer required on Poudriere 3, and our port it initially required 
hammer but now now longer does.

pkg doesn't require hammer or ZFS.

John