Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Baseline Mac OS X Support merged into FreeBSD package manager

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 61 posts

Re: Baseline Mac OS X Support merged into FreeBSD package manager

#11

Post by justincormack »

aduitsis wrote: post #7

This is great news. Pkgng is very easy to use and achieves a very good combination of binary packages and the FreeBSD ports tree when you want to compile stuff yourself. Which happens more often than expected admittedly.

You can already have that with pkgsrc for osx - joyent maintains the osx binary packages see http://pkgsrc.joyent.com/

(pkgsrc is the NetBSD version of FreeBSD ports, but its always been portable to other systems).

Re: Baseline Mac OS X Support merged into FreeBSD package manager

#12

Post by skuhn »

mikepurvis wrote: post #8
oellegaard wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a binary package manager vs homebrew that downloads the source, patches it and compiles it AFAIK.

Most of the standard stuff in homebrew is available in bottled form. Which isn't to say Homebrew doesn't have its problems— setting up your own bottling infrastructure is difficult/impossible, and basic stuff like caching dependencies isn't there (cf. https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/issues/27457 ).

It can be done (I'm doing it in production), but it is not thought out with this situation in mind. I forked the formula repo at some point in the distant past, and untar it onto each machine. Then I manually manage dependencies when I tell it to fetch bottles from my own source.

A lot of the simplicity and 'it just works' nature of Homebrew is because it's meant to be used in one situation and that's it.

Re: Baseline Mac OS X Support merged into FreeBSD package manager

#16

Post by lobster_johnson »

derefr wrote: post #15

Naive question: does the pkg(7) format used by FreeBSD have anything to do with the .pkg files Apple distributes? And if not, why not try to be "OSX native" using .pkg files instead of "BSD native" using pkg(7)?

No, Apple's .pkg files are proprietary to Apple's Installer.app. They are XAR archives containing metadata generated by the package creation GUI.

Re: Baseline Mac OS X Support merged into FreeBSD package manager

#17

Post by avtar »

justincormack wrote: post #11
aduitsis wrote: post #7

This is great news. Pkgng is very easy to use and achieves a very good combination of binary packages and the FreeBSD ports tree when you want to compile stuff yourself. Which happens more often than expected admittedly.

You can already have that with pkgsrc for osx - joyent maintains the osx binary packages see http://pkgsrc.joyent.com/ (pkgsrc is the NetBSD version of FreeBSD ports, but its always been portable to other systems).

Hmm I didn't know that Joyent maintained their own packages for non-SmartOS platforms. The OS X packages seem to be limited to 32-bit versions and even though you didn't mention this I noticed their Linux packages seem to lag behind pkgsrc upstream. What is the advantage of using their packages over the OS X and Linux ones offered by NetBSD? https://www.pkgsrc.org/#platforms

Re: Baseline Mac OS X Support merged into FreeBSD package manager

#18

Post by tootie »

santaclaus wrote: post #2

Interesting! What is the advantage of the FreeBSD package manager over existing OS X package managers like Homebrew or MacPorts?

It's good to combine efforts. It means potentially a bigger selection of packages that are available to install and more developers maintaining the project since it now has a wider potential user base.

Re: Baseline Mac OS X Support merged into FreeBSD package manager

#19

Post by brynet »

derefr wrote: post #15

Naive question: does the pkg(7) format used by FreeBSD have anything to do with the .pkg files Apple distributes? And if not, why not try to be "OSX native" using .pkg files instead of "BSD native" using pkg(7)?

FreeBSD's binary packages aren't .pkg, but rather .txz (.tar + .xz).

http://pkg.freebsd.org/freebsd:10:x86:64/latest/All/2bsd-dif...:

  -rw-r--r--  1 root     wheel          626 Dec 31  1969 +COMPACT_MANIFEST
  -rw-r--r--  1 root     wheel          921 Dec 31  1969 +MANIFEST
  tar: Removing leading / from absolute path names in the archive
  -r-xr-xr-x  1 root     wheel        30616 Oct  3 10:49 usr/local/bin/2diff
  -r-xr-xr-x  1 root     wheel        11256 Oct  3 10:49 usr/local/libexec/2diffh
  -r--r--r--  1 root     wheel         2823 Oct  3 10:49 usr/local/man/man1/2diff.1.gz
This is similar to other BSD binary package formats.

Re: Baseline Mac OS X Support merged into FreeBSD package manager

#20

Post by tomphoolery »

santaclaus wrote: post #2

Interesting! What is the advantage of the FreeBSD package manager over existing OS X package managers like Homebrew or MacPorts?

IMHO, Homebrew offers a lot of advantages over traditional package management tools. It's simple to use, offers a really easy way to add your own packages, and contributing upstream is quite painless. MacPorts has always been reminiscent (to me, anyways) of the FreeBSD Ports Collection...it might even be based on it I'm not sure. So this seems like a prelude to a possible sunsetting of the MacPorts project in favor of simply using FreeBSD's package management tools on OS X. Not sure it's going to draw me away from using Homebrew just yet, but it's nice to know that there's a continuing effort to have OS X be a part of the UNIX-like OS community.

(fake edit: it's been a LONG time since I've used FreeBSD. feel free to chime in about how wrong I am regarding the ease of adding ports on your own private or public server if things have changed)

Post reply on HN