From owner-freebsd-ports Wed Oct 23 19:15:19 1996 Return-Path: owner-ports Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id TAA29261 for ports-outgoing; Wed, 23 Oct 1996 19:15:19 -0700 (PDT) Received: from agora.rdrop.com (root@agora.rdrop.com [199.2.210.241]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id TAA29256 for ; Wed, 23 Oct 1996 19:15:15 -0700 (PDT) Received: from insl2.etec.uni-karlsruhe.de by agora.rdrop.com with smtp (Smail3.1.29.1 #17) id m0vGFK5-000969C; Wed, 23 Oct 96 19:15 PDT Received: (from erb@localhost) by insl2.etec.uni-karlsruhe.de (8.7.6/8.7.2) id EAA17207 for freebsd-ports@freebsd.org; Thu, 24 Oct 1996 04:11:09 +0200 (MET DST) Message-Id: <199610240211.EAA17207@insl2.etec.uni-karlsruhe.de> Subject: FreeBSD pkg system vs Debian dpkg To: freebsd-ports@freebsd.org Date: Thu, 24 Oct 1996 04:11:09 +0200 (MET DST) Reply-To: erb@inss1.etec.uni-karlsruhe.de From: erb@inss1.etec.uni-karlsruhe.de (Olaf Erb) X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL19 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-ports@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk Hi, in a discussion at a German Unix Newsgroup I explained some problems I ran into with the FreeBSD ports system, and how it compares with Debian Linux (the discussion is- as usual- Linux vs. FreeBSD ;). J. Wunsch told me my thoughts may be interesting for the ports developers, so here they are, roughly translated from my German posting: Ports are really helpful, I like them very much. But the FreeBSD pkg system lacks some (in my opinion) very important things, compared to the Debian dpkg system, which I've been using for one year or so with a big pleasure- the pkg system, not Linux itself. Then I nuked the Linux stuff (not only, but mainly because of it's really annoying kernelupdate frequency, lots of bugs that never got fixed and the libc/gcc/binutils/ whatever chaos) and installed FreeBSD, so I think I can now compare those two systems a little now. - ports dependencies are a little simple- there's a check if needed libs (e.g. tcl/tk/perl etc.) are installed, if not, they're installed, too. But pkg_add isn't checking if an older version of the to-be-installed package exists. You're ending up with many different pkg entries if you don't take care about this. Deleting the old ones (what a fool I am, I did this the first time I used the pkg stuff- ending up with no zsh ;) deletes the same files now owned by the new versions. Installing a newer version of a package makes the database inconsistent, removing the old ones with pkg_delete, too. There should be really a check if the old version should be replaced/removed, maybe a message about leftover files or so.. - another -imho- really important thing is a check if files to be installed do already exist (or if owned by another package). I nuked mtools with installing pine (/usr/local/bin/mtest which is a symlink to mtools, so mtools was overwritten and is now pines' mtest program ;). Debian Linux "dpkg" takes care of all this. It checks dependencies, removes old versions if needed, complains about missing stuff etc. ("can't remove blah-lib because foobaz, blah, fasel need it"). Its "deselect" tool even checks if new versions of packages are available via ftp and fetches/installes them. Only binary packages, though. The problem with overwriting programs someone manually installed doesn't exist, too, because all .deb packages are integrated into the base system (which I personally don't like). /usr/local is complely untouched. But it's missing some (important, I think) FreeBSD-ports features: directly installing/fetching sources with make all install, a make world, updating the sourcetree (which sourcetree?) via CTM/SUP. You can create binary packages for installing later, but not with a single make. I hope this wasn't too boring, just some thoughts that could help to improve the ports collection to withstand the Linux crowd ;-) I'd be very interested what you think about all this, it's just my view from about three or four months experience with FreeBSD (-current). Olaf -- There is no such thing as a problem without a gift for you in its hands. You seek problems because you need their gifts. -- Richard Bach, Illusions