Do I want to switch to the new pkg(8) format?

[Andrew Berg]

On 2014.12.26 16:57, Chris Stankevitz wrote:
> If both statement are indeed true, then I must conclude:
> 
> 1. Upgrading ports is not a "package management" operation.
Incorrect. You can't upgrade anything (and track it) if you don't have a
package. Whether you create a package or someone else does is irrelevant. Using
normal ports tools builds and installs packages.
> 
> 2. There are many different "operations" you can do with ports and packages.
Sure. There's fetching (or updating) the ports tree, calculating dependencies,
fetching source code, configuring, building, staging, packaging, installing,
and uninstalling (in that order), as well as a few other miscellaneous things.
Who goes through all the stages up to and including packaging is again, irrelevant.
> 
> 3. Each "operation" might use a different tool.  Sometimes pkg,
> portmaster, portsnap, make, cvs, pkg_, portsclean, portupgrade, etc.
And ultimately, you install or uninstall a binary package with pkg. The process
of getting from ports metadata and a source tarball to a package can involve
different tools for different stages. Some tools are wrappers around several of
those stages that call other tools (e.g., poudriere and portmaster). You cannot
actually do much of anything useful without pkg, since it is responsible for
calculating dependencies, creating packages, and installing packages (among
other things).