Live data from Hacker News

Using NetBSD’s pkgsrc everywhere I can

rubenerd.com

1–10 of 80 posts

Re: Using NetBSD’s pkgsrc everywhere I can

#3
No mention of DragonflyBSD? They used pkgsrc as their main package manager for 10 years, portable or not, it still required quite a bit of maintenance. Seems like it was too much in the end, second-class citizen rights are not great.

Re: Using NetBSD’s pkgsrc everywhere I can

#4
post #3

No mention of DragonflyBSD? They used pkgsrc as their main package manager for 10 years, portable or not, it still required quite a bit of maintenance. Seems like it was too much in the end, second-class citizen rights are not great.

Did they migrate away from pkgsrc? If so, do you know any specifics about why?

Re: Using NetBSD’s pkgsrc everywhere I can

#5
I'd been wondering how good pgksrc is on macOS for a little while, previously having used Homebrew wherever Nixpkgs was inconvenient or incomplete. Could pkgsrc could be a better choice?

pkgsrc is relatively nice for a cross-platform, source-based package manager in the old style, in that it provides convenient binary caches for most use cases.

I wonder: Has the writer of the post in the OP tried any next-gen source-based package managers, where the kind of isolation he describes as desirable between system and user packages is guaranteed between all packages altogether?

Re: Using NetBSD’s pkgsrc everywhere I can

#6
post #4
post #3

No mention of DragonflyBSD? They used pkgsrc as their main package manager for 10 years, portable or not, it still required quite a bit of maintenance. Seems like it was too much in the end, second-class citizen rights are not great.

Did they migrate away from pkgsrc? If so, do you know any specifics about why?

https://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/users/2013-Septembe...

Re: Using NetBSD’s pkgsrc everywhere I can

#7
post #2

Very interesting, I didn't know pkgsrc could be used on Linux, I'll check it out. In general the only things keeping me from BSD are non free apps like Zoom so the next best thing is to BSDify my systems.

I'd try nixpkgs before trying pkgsrc if for some reason I wasn't satisfied with ones that come with the distro. Not sure why BSDfying packages is desirable by itself.

Re: Using NetBSD’s pkgsrc everywhere I can

#8
Other package management systems do one or two of the following things, but I haven't found any that can do all three at once, other than pkgsrc:

1) have good availability of pre-built binary packages for most platforms

2) facilitate building of packages directly from source, whether on non-mainstream platforms / architectures, and / or with or for the purpose of non-default package options

3) unprivileged builds / installations, packages rooted anywhere in filesystem, completely self-contained dependencies

Having to use more than one package management system because one or the other doesn't do one of these things can be a real pain, and can make maintenance rather difficult.

Re: Using NetBSD’s pkgsrc everywhere I can

#9
post #8

Other package management systems do one or two of the following things, but I haven't found any that can do all three at once, other than pkgsrc: 1) have good availability of pre-built binary packages for most platforms 2) facilitate building of packages directly from source, whether on non-mainstream platforms / architectures, and / or with or for the purpose of non-default package options 3) unprivileged builds / i…

nix does all three of these, I think.

Re: Using NetBSD’s pkgsrc everywhere I can

#10
post #8

Other package management systems do one or two of the following things, but I haven't found any that can do all three at once, other than pkgsrc: 1) have good availability of pre-built binary packages for most platforms 2) facilitate building of packages directly from source, whether on non-mainstream platforms / architectures, and / or with or for the purpose of non-default package options 3) unprivileged builds / i…

nix does all three of these, I think.

I guess 3 is sort of anti-nix, but I think nix effectively has this with the way nix-build/nix-shell work.
Post reply on HN