Re: ports and PBIs

On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 11:28 PM, Sam Fourman Jr. <sfourman_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 10:11 PM, Adam Vande More <amvandemore_at_gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, Apr 9, 2010 at 8:31 PM, Julian Elischer <julian_at_elischer.org> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> 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.
>>>
>>>
>> FWIW, when I see these discussions I'm always left wondering what's the bad
>> part?  I do think there are problems, but there doesn't seem to be a clear
>> defined set of what is wrong.   IMO, there should be a defined set of goals
>> to judge possible implementations against.
>
>
> Let me start by saying FreeBSD ports is by far the best system I have
> used to date.
> but as good as it is, there is room for improvement.
>
> Being a FreeBSD user now for many years, one thing I think would be nice is:
> being able to have easier access to development ports( Masked ports
> kinda like Gentoo).

Masking ports and packages in general introduces all sorts of fun new
complexity for end users as well as maintainers. The last time I used
Gentoo (which was only a matter of months ago), a lot portage packages
were still masked even though they've been stable for months, years,
etc. This is very annoying for me as an end-user because bug blah
could be fixed in a later release but in order to unmask the pieces
for version blah, I had to unmask 10~15 other `unstable packages',
which greatly increased the chance of instability on my system (this
was particularly the case back several years ago, but Gentoo has
become more conservative over the years, and appears to be approaching
some level of equilibrium with Fedora, Ubuntu, etc in terms of
releases and package versioning).

> right now is a GREAT example, currently there are new Gnome ,KDE and Xorg.
> these are all MAJOR ports,dependencies run deeper and deeper with every release.
> there can never be enough testing...but they all exist in random
> subversion servers around the web...

ports isn't going to solve this. Post the Xorg modularization (which
needed to occur anyhow because Xorg and Xfree86 before that was were
monolithic beasts), I personally don't see that change in the amount
of  flux on a quarterly cycle, and the number of packages I install
today isn't that much greater than back 6 years ago when I started
using FreeBSD. So, while there might be some claim here to note, I
think it's mostly exaggerated.

> I would very much like to help test these Major ports, but installing
> them is a pain.
> there should be some sort of overlay system in place, so I can just
> build the development ports
> after agreeing to a few well placed warnings of course. and Well if I
> hose my system all to hell..
> well then I could just click on a bunch of PBI's and I am back in business...

Ok, apart from the interface (click a PBI, and magically you have
packages installed)... how is this really different from binary
packages? Have you tried installing binary packages lately via
pkg_add? If not, I'd give it a shot instead of installing from ports.

> better still, make the development ports a PBI, I am just thinking out
> loud here,but that may work, toughts?
>
> one could say I could use merge scripts like marcusmerge for example,
> or use Virtualbox...
> but for large ports like Xorg and gnome or KDE, virtualbox doesn't cut it yet...
> thinks like Nvidia Video cards, multiple monitors, USB devices, and
> whatnot do not work on virtual box..
> PBI's for development ports, with all the dependencies, wrapped in one package.

Ok, well here's the thing. Instead of having N shared dependencies and
libraries in /usr/local/lib, you'd have N**2 shared dependencies and
libraries in each and every package. Now, let's look at size
difference. Here's just one sample:

$ ls -l irssi-0.8.14_1.tbz ~/Downloads/Irssi0.8.14_1-PV0.pbi
-rw-r--r--  1 gcooper  gcooper  6856203 Apr 10 00:05
/usr/home/gcooper/Downloads/Irssi0.8.14_1-PV0.pbi
-rw-r--r--  1 root     wheel     517442 Apr 10 00:07 irssi-0.8.14_1.tbz

The .tbz file is a file created with pkg_create -b, and the other file
is the PBI I pulled off of http://www.pbidir.com/bt/download/210/2079
. Big difference in size (13.25 fold difference).

PBIs only comprise a small set of packages in FreeBSD; if my
understanding is correct based on a mirror referenced in pbidir.com,
the number is currently under 500~750 PBIs -- this is drastically
smaller than the number of binary packages produced by ports on a
regular basis for FreeBSD.

> solution? well let all the developers develop working ports in
> progress in one place, give users like me a way to track these changes
> and install and test them... I think FreeBSD becomes a better place for it.

Packages are more of the answer IMO, not PBIs. PBIs are merely a
different set of contents and different means of delivering those
contents, and while I like the idea of point - click - install, I'm
not ready to create unnecessary complexity by having libraries rev'ed
according to what the maintainer A believes are correct, even though
maintainer B set it differently, and I'm not interested in sacrificing
disk space for this reason. If I wanted to use a packaging scheme like
this, I should be using Mac OSX as my primary operating system.

Thanks,
-Garrett

PS Don't let this discourage you though in considering the entry-level
user case. I'm just apparently more insane than some folks (not as
insane as some others though), and I just don't believe in this
ideology because things are fine for me as-is.