Re: Packaging of base system

There is an essential difference between packaging the base system and
having a distribution in the style of the linux distributions:

The "base system" packages are treated differently from the greater ports
collection:  They are released periodically as a unit.  They are versioned
as a unit.  They have POLA assurances.

Right now the base system is already loosely packaged.  i.e., there are
knobs in /etc/make.conf to control which parts get built.

The points of trouble are:
1) sysinstall doesn't understand this granularity
2) the user visible means of manipulating which parts of the base system
   are installed are gratuitously different from ports.
2a) no mechanism exists to verify that /etc/make.conf contains
    a consistent set of components (dependency issues)--no mechanism
    that is accept to try and see what crumbles a couple of hours later.

-Jon


On Tue, 10 May 2005, Bruce A. Mah wrote:

> If memory serves me right, Brian Candler wrote:
> > On Tue, May 10, 2005 at 12:55:42AM -0600, M. Warner Losh wrote:
> > > As this comes up all the time, I'd say just do it.  People here will
> > > talk your ear off.
> >
> > OK. I am just a bit dubious about starting a large chunk of work, only to be
> > told later "we're not going to commit this, the consensus here is we don't
> > want to do it this way because X / Y / Z"
>
> The way to do this (and maybe this is already obvious to you) is to
> start with as small a chunk of work as you can do (think "proof of
> concept" or even "implementation notes")...don't try to get it all
> perfect before putting it out for comments / feedback / bikesheds.  In
> the worst case, if it turns out that everybody hates the idea, you've at
> least cut your losses.
>
> You probably want some early feedback from re_at_ (once they've recovered
> from getting 5.4 out).
>
> Honestly I'm not sure if I like this idea or not.  My most recent
> experience with a fully packaged system is with RH/FC Linux
> distributions and many times I feel like I'm in a twisty little maze of
> RPMs, all different.  You seem to be proposing a more coarse-grained
> packaging, which I think is more workable.
>
> > Incidentally, do we have a current status on this?
> > http://people.freebsd.org/~kientzle/libarchive/libpkg.3.txt
> >
> > This looks like a pre-requisite for turning the base system into packages.
>
> You could just email Tim and ask him.
>
> Bruce.
>
>