[HEADSUP] pkg(8) is now the only package management tool

[Rainer Duffner]

Am Wed, 3 Sep 2014 09:01:02 -0400
schrieb Paul Mather <paul at gromit.dlib.vt.edu>:


> Fairly recently, there was launched a "stable" ports branch.  This is 
> updated quarterly, and seems akin to the quarterly releases of pkgsrc 
> in that the given branch receives only security updates after it is 
> created.  It appears to be fairly low-key.  I remember seeing an 
> announcement on several FreeBSD mailing lists about its initial 
> release, but haven't seen anything since (even though I believe it is 
> now in its second quarter, at least).

It's actually already in its 3rd quarter.

> My question is this: does anyone have experience of tracking ports
> via these branches?  Does it work well? 

So far, it works well - for me.
But of course I build all my packages myself. About 1200 or so, some of
them I just use myself.
Occasionally, when a port does not build (dovecot2 in Q2, IIRC), I need
to take stuff from the "current" ports-tree. But it's not such a big
deal.
Q3 built everything right out of the box, though.

Sometimes, when the installed pkg is too old, I have to fetch the
newest pkg-package from my build, unpack pkg and the libpkg library and
use that to upgrade the tree.
I've got to see how the 1.2 -> 1.3 transition goes.

I hope we can reach a state soon, where pkg is completely in the
base-system and not changed much (or at all) over releases - or the
database-format doesn't change much. Because I assume, a
package-downgrade that also involves a downgrade of pkg itself is
currently almost impossible.

As for the subject of this discussion:

I don't upgraded all my machines every quarter (yet).

I've also stopped building for i386 a long time ago - simply because we
haven't bought a non-AMD64 server for as long as I can remember being
at my current employer...

I've got builds for 8 9 and 10, sometimes with different "flavors", but
I try to minimze variety (FreeBSD 10 only with MariaDB55, PHP55 etc. -
no PHP55, no MariaDB55 to earlier releases - some stuff like perl, ruby
is all the same on every major release until it's no longer in the
ports-tree - then I need to lift it everywhere).

I can see that you can't just upgrade any machine to the latest and
greatest - I cannot do that either.
But at the same time, the customer cannot expect to have the latest and
greatest software on a five year old OS.

Are there really people who need to maintain current ports with pkg_*
tools on older FreeBSD-releases (that aren't supported by the
ports-tree anymore, sometimes for ages)?
That's going to be tough...

All my machines with pkg_ still work well (sort of) - I just can't
touch them. But almost all machines where this is the case are usually
very old and can't be touched anyway. 

I can imagine that if you have a very large infrastructure and tooling
tuned to use pkg_* it is very frustrating to dump all of this into the
garbage-bin and start from scratch - but the writing of this has been
on the wall for some time.

Maybe Solaris or RedHat would be better platforms for those negatively
affected by this - they have very stable APIs that are supported for a
very long time. But porting non-mainstream 3rd-party software to these
OSs might be challenging, too, after a couple of years. 3rd-party
software moves on, too.