please document the pkg-ng repo problem

[Matthew Seaman]

On 20/10/2013 03:00, Daniel Herring wrote:

> pkg-ng has been broken for a year now (the public repo is nearly
> useless), and I see no indication when the repo will be rebuilt.

That's a bit hyperbolic don't you think?  Many people are using pkgng
perfectly happily.

Yes, there is a problem[*] with the official pkg repository at
http://pkg.freebsd.org/ in that the sum total of the contents is one
fairly outdated copy of pkg-1.0.x.txz. That is just enough to bootstrap
pkgng by using /usr/sbin/pkg -- which is really the absolute minimum
that has to be there.

In the mean time there are packages available at

    http://pkg-test.freebsd.org/pkg-test-${ABI}/latest

which is using the same machinery to build packages as will be used by
the official package builds, just made available under a different URL.
 [There are also package sets published by other groups, eg. Exonetric
or PC-BSD.  Or you can build your own very easily.]

"How exactly" I hear you ask "should I have been able to know that?"  I
agree that documentation of this is quite hard to find.  OK, *very* hard
to find.  That's not good.  The use of pkg-test was only meant as a
transient thing but it has taken longer than expected to shake the bugs
out and get everything working properly.

The good news is that this situation is about to change; imminently.
Expect to see an announcement about http://pkg.freebsd.org/ in the near
future.

> It would have saved me several hours if the Handbook advised users to
> not run "pkg2ng" until the repo is actually ready.
> 
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/pkgng-intro.html

These instructions are correct for the way we want package bootstrap to
work ultimately once all of the package building etc. is in place.
Given the imminent announcement I don't think that now is the right time
to change this section.

> https://wiki.freebsd.org/pkgng#Availability_of_binary_pkgs_for_Download

These are still correct, but somewhat incomplete nowadays.

> P.S.  IMO, this is a rather significant problem with the 10-beta.

Please be assured that 10.0-RELEASE is a significant milestone for pkgng
and there is a lot of work going on behind the scenes to make everything
ready in time for that release.  It's not just getting the official
package building cluster into shape and actually starting regular builds
of packages: there will be a new pkg-1.2 release with lots of
improvements, and there are ongoing projects to update the entire ports
tree to make it better integrated with pkgng.

Not to mention the changes outlined by bapt and erwin during the recent
Dev Summit session on ports and documented here:

 https://wiki.freebsd.org/201309DevSummit/Ports

	Cheers,

	Matthew

[*] Well, only one problem relevant to this discussion.

-- 
Dr Matthew J Seaman MA, D.Phil.
PGP: http://www.infracaninophile.co.uk/pgpkey


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