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

[Daniel Eischen]

On Wed, 20 Apr 2016, Allan Jude wrote:

> On 2016-04-20 01:12, Daniel Eischen wrote:
>>
>> For one of our Solaris 11 boxes, which also serves as a VNC
>> thin client server and NFS server, we have:
>>
>>   [sol11] $ pkg list | wc -l
>>      968
>>
>> That server includes the gnome desktop, firefox, thunderbird,
>> perl, python, wireshark, CDR tools, etc.  So arguably, it is
>> comparable to my FreeBSD desktop at home with KDE, firefox,
>> thunderbird, and similar tools.  For that FreeBSD box, and
>> just for ports packages (since I don't have base pkg'd):
>>
>>   [freebsd11] $ pkg info | wc -l
>>      865
>>
>> [And it really bothers me that FreeBSD 'pkg list' behaves
>>  like 'pkg files' or similar should.  It seems intuitive
>>  that 'pkg list' should list the packages, not all the files
>>  in all the packages.]
>>
>> If you add in 750+ FreeBSD base packages (1600+), that seems
>> like a very large number of packages.  And upgrading ports
>> packages is not always painless.  For the 865 FreeBSD packages
>> I have installed, only 27 of them are explicit - the rest are
>> dependencies.  I do not look forward to updating my packages,
>> even with poudriere.  There is usually manual intervention
>> required.  So it is with this experience that I do sort of
>> cringe at having 750+ FreeBSD base packages.
>>
>> I do like maintaining Solaris 11 boxes much better with their
>> pkg management, much better than the old patchadm.
>>
>
> does 'pkg prime-list' give you watch you are looking for? (pkgs you
> explicitly installed)

pkg prime-list does show the explicitly installed packages,
not sure how one would know to use 'prime-list' since it
doesn't appear in any of the man pages (looking at FreeBSD
10-stable right now).  And it doesn't show version information,
nor other option arguments that I can tell.  pkg help prime-list
says it's just an alias for "query -e '%a = 0' '%n'".  Seems
like "query -e '%a = 0' '%n\t%v\t%o'" is a little nicer,
though I'm not sure how to get all the columns to line up
nicely.

-- 
DE