[PLUG] debian-bsd (was: Re: when kswapd goes wild!)

[gabriel rosenkoetter <gr@eclipsed.net>]

On Fri, Nov 02, 2001 at 10:52:00PM -0500, Bill Jonas wrote:
> Yes, ports will do this automatically, but only if you compile from
> source.  No automatic dependecy handling if you install binary packages.
> Although I'll grant you that for some, this is a feature.  (One of the
> reasons often given by people who love Slackware for why they love
> Slackware, to take a Linux example.)

Considering how fast machines are these days... Ho, ho, ho.

Seriously, it is a five minute Perl hack to parse the depends out of
the Makefiles in pkgsrc (or ports if you're using FreeBSD) and issue
the correct pkg_add (or whatever it is that FreeBSD uses) commands.
(You get the deletion of the old packages for free with pkg_delete
-r, at least on NetBSD).

I'm shocked there isn't an extant pkg_update. Maybe I'll write one
and send-pr it. (The one downside, I guess, is that pkgsrc would
have to exist on your system even if you weren't using it. But
perhaps we could just add an automated process to dig the depends
lines out of pkgsrc as they're commited on the CVS server. I'll
probably be playing around with cvs.netbsd.org's CVSROOT/commitinfo
file in the vaguely near future anyway, see a discussion from a few
weeks ago.)

> So you have two choices: automatic dependency handling with high
> installation latency (the compilation process) or no automatic
> dependency handling with low installation latency (pkg_add with binary
> packages).

This is an extremely valid point, but I don't think it's something
that can't be fixed really simply with what exists now.

(Not to say that having apt's interface wouldn't be nice, especially
to those already familiar with it.)

> BTW, have you ever used apt?  It's quite nice.  It may not be your cup
> of tea, though.  It's not nearly as nice as the *BSD ports system if
> your thing is compiling all your stuff from source, but it's much nicer
> to use if you install binary packages.

I do prefer to have things built from source, since internal bug
and security fixes show up much more frequently than binary packages
are built on most of the architectures I use (mac68k, next68k,
macppc), but I do also get irked by how long rebuilding, say, teTeX
can be, even on my 800 MHz AMD Thunderbird with a fast SCSI disk.

I've never run a Debian system, but it's what sccs.swarthmore.edu
(see related www.) uses exclusively (well, as regards Linux distros;
they've got one PC, a mac running LinuxPPC, a mac running MacOS X, a
couple of SGIs running Irix, a couple NeXTs running NeXTStep...),
and I hang out with their admins plenty, so I know how it works,
and I agree that it's good, but I'm not sure it's enough better
than the quick hack I suggest above to grab a whole lot of (Net,
at least) BSD users' attention. (That is, it looks prettier, but
it's not clear that the functionality is inherently better.)

None of that answered the "what's Debian besides apt" question,
though. Is it? Is the point just to bring apt to BSD? On top of the
existing BSD package systems or as a replacement for it?

-- 
       ~ g r @ eclipsed.net

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