pkgng and the old pkg_* programs

Arthur Chance freebsd at qeng-ho.org
Mon Oct 22 11:47:07 UTC 2012


On 10/22/12 11:17, andrew clarke wrote:
> On Sun 2012-10-21 18:10:06 UTC+0100, Arthur Chance (freebsd at qeng-ho.org) wrote:
>
>> Now that portmaster officially supports pkgng I've converted to using
>> it. Is there any reason to keep the old pkg_* programs around, or can I
>> delete them and add WITHOUT_PKGTOOLS to my /etc/src.conf? I'm running
>> RELEASE-9.0 on amd64 and will update to REL-9.1 as soon as it arrives if
>> that matters.
>
> I don't think there's any harm in leaving the pkg_* programs there?

I doubt whether there's any harm either, it's just the principle of not 
having useless binaries lying around. Partly it's an old (and obsolete) 
habit developed in the days when the largest disks were a handful of 
megabytes in size, but it's also good security practice not to install 
anything that's unnecessary.

> Of course if you delete them, a binary upgrade with freebsd-update
> will most likely put them back.

I always upgrade from source, and cut out unused subsystems with the 
WITHOUT_* knobs in /etc/src.conf, so that's not going to be a problem.

> I've switched to pkgng on two machines here. Working well so far,
> although pkg2ng had some initial problems with the conversion due to
> some conflicting files that had been installed by different packages...

Ditto.



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