Re: Package download statistics

[Rumko <rumcic@xxxxxxxxx>]

John Marino wrote:

> On 6/1/2013 13:13, Chris Turner wrote:
>> On 05/30/13 01:59, Francois Tigeot wrote:
>>> The pkgsrc trend is reinforced though, almost nobody downloads pkgsrc
>>> packages.
>>
>> This could be an indication that pkgsrc users are more likely
>> to build from source
> 
> Since Francois is saying that pre-building pkgsrc binaries seems to be a
> waste and resources for DragonFly developers, stating that pkgsrc users
> only build from source makes the proposal to stop pre-building pkgsrc
> binaries a lot stronger.
> 
> The bigger question, of course, is *why* pkgsrc users are likely to
> build from source?

I can only say for myself, but the main reason is that I have enabled a few
non-default options and disabled a few default options, so unless I build the
packages myself, most of the pre-build packages would only bring me
unnecessary problems. Other than the wasted time (my HW is not that young), in
most cases (unbuildable package, but the updated dependencies break the
at-the-time-already installed package, e.g. ABI incompatible upgrades, which
is luckily relatively rare) it doesn't bring me any additional work over
binary packages.

> Could it be that they had lots of issues with that 
> in the past?  Who wouldn't want something fast and quick if it were
> trustworthy?  The "indication" alone is telling.

Well, as above, the machine (admin?) specific options are to blame for at least
a few (absolutely no idea how many in %), even fbsd ports/dports (IIRC) only
build packages for the default options, so when you play around you can
quickly doom yourself to source-only.


If I understand correctly, obsd ports seem to handle this way better than
pkgsrc and (d/freebsd)ports, they seem to have these so-called flavors which
actually tell what options are turned on/off. And IIRC ('twas quite a few
years ago), the actual flavor was part of the package name, so theoretically,
you could precompile all possible combinations of packages and their flavors.

It would be quite interesting to see sth like that being put into
pkgsrc/dports.
-- 
Regards,
Rumko