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

[Julian Elischer]

On 20/04/2016 2:25 PM, Daniel Eischen wrote:
> 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.
equally missing from help is 'pkg leaf'

These show that information needed is available.. it just needs to be 
presented right.