Date: Sat, 10 Apr 2010 01:06:09 -0500 From: "Sam Fourman Jr." <sfourman@gmail.com> To: Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org> Cc: ports@freebsd.org, "Dave Fourman\(Gmail\)" <dfourman@gmail.com>, Vanessa Kraus <vmkraus@gmail.com>, FreeBSD Current <current@freebsd.org> Subject: Re: ports and PBIs Message-ID: <o2o11167f521004092306m76e1a7b6h4696d0c0cdd849a1@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: <4BBFD502.1010507@elischer.org> References: <4BBFD502.1010507@elischer.org>
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On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 8:31 PM, Julian Elischer <julian@elischer.org> wrote= : > sorry for the cross-post.. > > Last night at the Bay Area FreeBSD Users Group meeting we had > a discussion about ports, and what is good about them and what > is bad about them. This has been a topic of discussion quite a > bit recently and we were looking for a solution that would > allow us to keep the good parts of the current ports system > but would allow us to give a better user experience for non > guru users. > > The scheme we came up with involves a merging of the > ports tree and the PBI system, developed for PC-BSD. > > Basically, the addition of a makepbi keyword in the .mk > files to allow the automatic generation of PBIs for 'simple' > ports such as 'cowsay' (the canonical simple app). > More complicated apps would need manual work in Makefile or > in a separate pbi-recipe file, but once the support was done > we could proceed one port at a time. =A0Not all ports make sense > in a PBI format. (e.g. libraries etc. may not) I for one support this Idea, and at a BoF FreeBSD Desktop session at BSDCan= 2008 one of my suggestions was to have FreeBSD "bless PBI's" I think this is good For PC-BSD. and in return it is GREAT for FreeBSD, as it will widen the user base and hopefully attract a few more good developers. keep this discussion going, because there isn't mush of a downside so far as I can see. Sam Fourman Jr. > One issue that was raised is the increase of storage > overhead when using PBI packages as they include a copy of > all required libraries and resources, which means that one would > very quickly get duplicate copies of things. > > Our suggestions include the ability of the PBI management software > to resolve and (using hard links) eliminate duplicate items. > This is not as easy as it sounds but can be achieved using a > special variant of 'objcopy' (at least that is our theory). > > The aim is to make all apps installed on a system much more > resilient to dependency problems. > > In addition there was discussion on how builds need to be doable as non-r= oot > uids sometimes, and that users on a system should be > able to install packages (PBIs) as thie selves to get local > versions of apps for themselves. > > Alfred Perlstein , Matt at ix systems Kris (Mr PBI), some > others and I, felt that these ideas seemed to make some sense > and so I put them here for comment. > > > Julian > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-ports@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-ports > To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-ports-unsubscribe@freebsd.org" >
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