Re: ports and PBIs

On 4/13/10 12:09 AM, Lucas Holt wrote:
> On 4/10/2010 3:18 PM, kris_at_pcbsd.org wrote
> <snip>
>> However for my more hard-core friends, nothing stopping you from
>> running your own ports down
>> the road, more power to ya! For doing something like embedded work or
>> a server this makes total
>> sense and I think it is a huge positive for FreeBSD, no reason to
>> trash that or break it in any way.
>> For the other 99.9% of society who want something "that just works"
>> for day-to-day computing,
>> something like PBI is very attractive. It would be great to have an OS
>> that offers best of both worlds.
>>
>> --
>> Kris Moore
>
> There are only two possibilities with any package system. Either give
> the user self packaged binaries containing all shared libraries or make
> them update everything. Both have positives and negatives. We've been
> working on a new package system in MidnightBSD for some time. When we
> weighed this issue, it was decided that letting users have old binaries
> sitting around was a bad idea. It encourages a user to sit on a package
> for a year and not install security updates. The larger package size
> also deters users from downloading updates in parts of the world which
> have slow Internet connections. Remember the GDI+ update to windows
> awhile back? There were many applications that had to be updated and
> Microsoft had to release a scanner to search the drive for uses. There
> side isn't always rosy.
>
> Obviously, there are also advantages to the larger PBI packages for
> users. PC-BSD is certainly easy to use.
>
> At the end of the day, I think creating packages more frequently during
> releases and pushing updates like many linux distros do makes more sense
> in terms of security. FreeBSD has ten times the number of ports to build
> than we do so obviously it's a problem to build packages that frequently.
>
> I don't want to butt in any more on this because it's not my place, but
> I just felt it was important to bring another perspective.

It may be thaat part of the answer is to do both.

For me I want to have PBIs for the actual tools I use on the machine..
things like wine, openoffice, gimp, etc. I don't care if these are 
'bleeding edge'. I just want them to work, and to keep working no 
matter what I do in my development environment.

On the other had for stuff I'm working on, I want ot be able to get 
the newest libraries etc and keep them up to date. This means I run
the dependency problem but I'm willing to upgrade everything and if it 
breaks occasionally, I'll fix it. regardless of whether my development 
environment is current;y broke or not, the tools I actually use on the 
machine will not be affected.

So for me I see a reason tehat we should use BOTH schemes.




>
> Lucas
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