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To: asami@cs.berkeley.edu (Satoshi Asami |
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cc: ports@freefall.cdrom.com
Subject: Re: OK, the fake-pkg stuff should work.. 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Fri, 21 Apr 95 23:31:33 PDT."
             <199504220631.XAA03878@silvia.HIP.Berkeley.EDU> 
Date: Fri, 21 Apr 1995 23:56:49 -0700
Message-ID: <11596.798533809@freefall.cdrom.com>
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@freefall.cdrom.com>
Sender: ports-owner@FreeBSD.org
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> Cool!  So you did it using pkg_create (that's how I was trying to do
> it initially, as I told you (^o^)).  It's great that we got this into

Yeah, I knew you'd notice that and say "I told you so!" :-)

In actuality, it really shouldn't be in pkg_create at all and it was a
hack to put it there (which I'm not proud of) but it was, at least, a
_very small_ hack which some sort of minor comfort..

For the long term, I'm not sure about the pkg_* stuff anyway.  I've
been saying for months that it needs to die and be replaced by
something MUCH more robust, but it seems that progress has instead
been incremental, with people working on improving it gradually rather
than replacing it entirely, and I'm not quite sure how I feel about
that!  If it can be made to work, then I hate to go gratuitously
incompatable by changing the underlying archive format.  Most of my
concerns with the current pkg scheme revolved around the fact that tar
files were, up to now, stupid serial things that tar would always
insist on winding all the way through before doing anything else.
This limited my ability to do things like "extract the first file and
look at it for further instructions" - something you need to do if the
XFree86 and FreeBSD *dist distrutions are to ever become packages.
You need some sort of "extract me in-place, please" hint to make it
work.  Now that tar has been hacked with --fast-read (and I agree, the
name could be better) it should be possible to actually do cleverer
things like this.

						Jordan