Pkgsrc-2015Q1 packages for OS X now available

#1

Post by jperkin » Mon, Apr 20, 2015, 8:37 AM UTC

Pkgsrc-2015Q1 packages for OS X now available
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Re: Pkgsrc-2015Q1 packages for OS X now available

#2

Post by dotemacs » Mon, Apr 20, 2015, 9:15 AM UTC

Really cool to see pkgsrc progressing and staying true to their original aim, being cross platform and useful.

Re: Pkgsrc-2015Q1 packages for OS X now available

#3

Post by jperkin » Mon, Apr 20, 2015, 9:48 AM UTC

Not sure why someone has edited the title, the point of posting this release specifically (we release every quarter) was that the binary packages are now signed by default - an important requirement these days - and I wanted to emphasise that.

Anyway, enjoy! Happy to answer any questions.

Re: Pkgsrc-2015Q1 packages for OS X now available

#4

Post by mukundmr » Mon, Apr 20, 2015, 10:34 AM UTC

Is there a benefit to this over Homebrew or Macports or am I missing the use case?

Re: Pkgsrc-2015Q1 packages for OS X now available

#5

Post by zimbatm » Mon, Apr 20, 2015, 10:46 AM UTC

mukundmr wrote: post #4

Is there a benefit to this over Homebrew or Macports or am I missing the use case?

One use case I can think of is if you want to use the same packaged versions between the developer machine (OSX) and your deployment environment (Linux). It not 100% the same but it could help uncover issues before they are deployed. And you don't get the overhead of visualization.

Re: Pkgsrc-2015Q1 packages for OS X now available

#6

Post by chkuendig » Mon, Apr 20, 2015, 10:51 AM UTC

zimbatm wrote: post #5

mukundmr wrote: post #4

Is there a benefit to this over Homebrew or Macports or am I missing the use case?

One use case I can think of is if you want to use the same packaged versions between the developer machine (OSX) and your deployment environment (Linux). It not 100% the same but it could help uncover issues before they are deployed. And you don't get the overhead of visualization.

You get exactly the same with macports and brew: Very little patching and no virtualization.

Re: Pkgsrc-2015Q1 packages for OS X now available

#7

Post by zimbatm » Mon, Apr 20, 2015, 10:53 AM UTC

I don't know if it's representative but nodejs is still at version 0.10.36 : https://github.com/joyent/pkgsrc/blob/trunk/lang/nodejs/Make...

This post was supposed to be a troll about them not packaging io.js (they don't).

Re: Pkgsrc-2015Q1 packages for OS X now available

#8

Post by zimbatm » Mon, Apr 20, 2015, 10:54 AM UTC

chkuendig wrote: post #6

zimbatm wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One use case I can think of is if you want to use the same packaged versions between the developer machine (OSX) and your deployment environment (Linux). It not 100% the same but it could help uncover issues before they are deployed. And you don't get the overhead of visualization.

You get exactly the same with macports and brew: Very little patching and no virtualization.

The package definition is not the same or are you using brew and macports to install on Linux ?

Re: Pkgsrc-2015Q1 packages for OS X now available

#9

Post by jperkin » Mon, Apr 20, 2015, 10:55 AM UTC

mukundmr wrote: post #4

Is there a benefit to this over Homebrew or Macports or am I missing the use case?

The main general benefit of pkgsrc is that it's cross-platform and, having been around since 1997, now runs on 22 different operating systems.

This means that rather than having to run Homebrew or MacPorts on OS X, rpm or apt on Linux, ports on FreeBSD, dports on DragonFly, cyg-apt on Cygwin, .. - you get the idea - you could instead just run pkgsrc across all of them, and only have to worry about one set of tools and only have to update one software repository. pkgsrc will happily run as an unprivileged user in your home directory if you just want to compliment the system package manager.

For OS X specifically, we provide this binary package repository to make it very easy for people to get started. pkgin has a very familiar interface for people used to other binary package managers, so after a couple of commands to install the tools you can start installing from 11,000+ binary packages quickly and easily.

For developers there is a lot that pkgsrc offers in terms of aiding portability, and due to the large number of supported platforms a lot of infrastructure to support them, but that is a whole topic by itself.

Reversing the question, I don't see that Homebrew or Macports have many benefits over pkgsrc, other than Homebrew is arguably easier to write new packages for (if you know ruby), and Macports has more packages. However I will be glad to admit I'm no expert on either of them, so if there are other advantages please tell me so we can take a look at improving feature parity.

Re: Pkgsrc-2015Q1 packages for OS X now available

#10

Post by 4ad » Mon, Apr 20, 2015, 10:58 AM UTC

mukundmr wrote: post #4

Is there a benefit to this over Homebrew or Macports or am I missing the use case?

The main benefit to me is that I can avoid homebrew and macports, which are utter garbage.

There are many other benefits in pkgsrc, including, but not limited to, stable releases instead of rolling release, cross platform support, corporate interest in making the platforms stable, because it's used as a basic building block in Joyent's SmartMachines etc.

But all this pales in comparison to the advantage of avoiding homebrew and macports.