Re: ports and PBIs

On Sunday, April 11, 2010, Tim Kientzle <kientzle_at_freebsd.org> wrote:
> Garrett Cooper wrote:
>
> If I'm understanding you correctly you're saying it's an issue when I do:
>
> pkg_add A B C
>
> # 1 year passes
>
> pkg_add D
>
> # D depends on A, B, C, of different revisions. pkg_add barfs because
> it can't find the applications, etc.
>
> This is something that's been hashed over a number of times (a few of
> which I've participated in in #bsdports). There needs to be a simple
> update command which will handle the action of upgrading packages,
> because there isn't a proper command that will do so today.
>
>
> I'm not convinced that the "simple update command" you
> mention is actually feasible, much less desirable.
> (If I want to try out the new Firefox, why does that
> imply that my year-old Gimp has to be upgraded?)
>
> As for feasibility, here's the easy problem:
>    A2.7 requires B3.6
>      ... one year passes ...
>    A4.8 now requires B7.2
> But A4.8 is incompatible with B3.6 and A2.7 is
> incompatible with B7.2.  So neither A nor B
> can be updated separately without breaking the system.
>
> Here's the hard problem:
>    A2.7 requires B3.6
>      ... one year passes ...
>    I want to install C1.0 which requires B7.2
>    but there hasn't been a new release of A that
>    works with B7.2.
> So I now simply cannot have both C1.0 and A2.7
> installed at the same time because they require
> different versions of B.
>
> PBI avoids both of these problems.  It may
> be unsuitable for embedded systems[1], but
> I see no reason we should not extend the existing
> ports/packages system with additional tools that
> target certain use cases, and PBI seems a good
> fit for the desktop case.
>
> Tim

Genuine (possibly stupid) question -in PBI land, what happens if
package B is, say, CUPS? Does one need versioned rc.d scripts to start
one or the other? Which one gets to claim port 631?

-James Butler

>
> [1] Actually, PBI might work just fine even for
> embedded if we address the disk bloat issue.  One
> approach would be to make
>    /Package/Bar/libfoo-2.8.7.so
> a symlink or hardlink to
>    /Package/Shared/libfoo-2.8.7.so-<MD5-hash>
> This gives easy sharing of identical files.
> It's even easy to handle at install time:
>   * Installer writes libfoo-2.8.7.so to
>      /Package/Shared/libfoo-2.8.7.so-temp-<PID of installer>
>   * Installer computes hash of file as it's written
>   * Installer renames file (delete if rename fails with EEXIST)
>   * Installer writes symlink or hardlink into /Package/Bar
>
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