[CFT] packaging the base system with pkg(8)

[Rainer Duffner]

> Am 18.04.2016 um 22:07 schrieb Lev Serebryakov <lev at FreeBSD.org>:
> 
> On 18.04.2016 22:40, Glen Barber wrote:
> 
>> This granularity allows easy removal of things that may not be wanted
>> (such as *-debug*, *-profile*, etc.) on systems with little storage.  On
>> one of my testing systems, I removed the tests packages and all debug
>> and profiling, and the number of base system packages is 383.
> IMHO, granularity like "all base debug", "all base profile" is enough
> for this. Really, I hardly could imagine why I will need only 1 debug or
> profile package, say, for csh. On resource-constrained systems NanoBSD
> is much better anyway (for example, my typical NanoBSD installation is
> 37MB base system, 12MB /boot and 10 packages), and on developer system
> where you need profiled libraries it is Ok to install all of them and
> don't think about 100 packages for them.
> 
> Idea of "Roles" from old FreeBSD installers looks much better. Again,
> here are some "contrib" software which have one-to-one replacements in
> ports, like sendmail, ssh/sshd, ntpd, but split all other
> FreeBSD-specific code? Yes, debug. Yes, profile. Yes, static libraries.
> Yes, lib32 on 64 bit system.
> 
>  It seems that it is ideological ("holy war") discussion more than
> technical one...



From the discussion, I believe it’s primarily driven by the need/desire to have small packages to make updates easier on the mirror-servers.

I’m really not sure (yet), which is worse: the current system that pulls down some 14k small files for a system-upgrade - or a system where the base-system is split into almost 800 packages.

freebsd-update is „only" unreliable if
 - you go through a proxy with authentication
 - that proxy doesn’t do http-pipelining (or does it bad/is broken is this respect) (certain version of Sophos UTM for example…)

AFAIK.

As for the packages: I wouldn’t mind „fatter“ packages. I’d mirror them locally anyway (I hope this is possible - AFAIK, the freebsd-update files are not supposed to be mirrored), and I don’t have a thousand servers to pull them down all at once anyway (working on that ;-)).

I’m pretty sure the impact on the current FreeBSD delivery infrastructure would be quite substantial, if updates came in 60MB chunks - esp. if there was some sort of auto-update mechanism in place.
Fast-forward to the future where a lot (millions?) more embedded devices are based on FreeBSD and pull updates from the FreeBSD infrastructure.
Or if the container hype-train reached FreeBSD and people started to containerize everything, resulting in even more base-package update downloads.

So, I can see both sides. Neither I’m really satisfied with.

I hope a way is found to manage these number of packages without losing sanity and that a normal pkg info doesn’t list them.
And that pkg upgrade doesn’t upgrade base-packages.