Re: [HEADSUP & CFT] pkg 1.0rc1 and schedule

I do not mean this e-mail to be in any way critical. I was told after
the new OPTIONS framework discussion that I should have asked questions
before the change, so I'm asking these questions now; in a genuine
attempt to get information.

On 07/12/2012 03:01 AM, Baptiste Daroussin wrote:

In the time that you have been working on this project I have asked
numerous times for you(pl.) to answer the following questions:

1. What are the goals for pkg?
2. Why can't the existing tools fulfill those goals?
3. How does pkg fulfill them?

You've put some of this in the various places where pkg is documented,
but I don't see any thorough treatment of these questions. You have some
of it below, which I'd like to see expanded on if you would be so kind. :)

> Why pkg?
> --------
> pkg_* tools have become hardly maintainable over the time,

I agree on this point, but the right solution (as some of us have been
saying for years) is to move the pkg_* tools into the ports tree. You
are correctly handling that by keeping pkg in the ports tree, I'm simply
pointing out that this isn't a reason we need to switch to pkg.

> it lacks lots of features most of people are expecting from a package manager:
>   - binary upgrade

I'm not sure what you mean by this. We have the ability to create binary
packages now.

>   - ability to search information about remote packages

This is a good feature, certainly. However there is no reason we can't
create a tool to do this, or add the functionality to an existing tool.

>   - real reverse dependency tracking
>   - tracking leaves

Can you expand on what these 2 mean?

What I'm looking for is compelling motivation to make this overwhelming
change to the ports infrastructure.


> Schedule
> --------
> 
> The plan is to switch the ports tree to pkgng on CURRENT by default on July 25th
> No dates are planned yet for other branches.

Can you describe how this is going to be done? I assume with an
OSVERSION knob in bsd.port.mk?

> Note that there will be a NO_PKGNG knob for some time (undefined yet) for people
> not will to switch on July 25th
> 
> Please also note that some ports won't work with pkgng right now, because pkgng
> is more strict than pkg_install on purpose.
> The major one is: nvidia drivers, because pkgng does not allow to overwrite a file
> owned by another package, and we will not accept any hacks for that in pkgng.

IMO it would be a very large mistake to switch the default in any branch
until the problem with the nvidia drivers is sorted out. We have a lot
of users (myself included) who use this port, and by switching the
default there's going to be 1 of 2 outcomes for those users. Either they
will opt-out, which means you won't get the level of testing you're
looking for; or you'll break their existing ports installation. Neither
outcome is desirable.

Doug