Re: [CFT] packaging the base system with pkg(8)

Guys please stop arguing about the number of packages.  The high 
granularity is VERY useful!

Managing large groups of small packages is much easier than just having 
large packages.

All this can be done by meta-packages which depend on larger package groups.

Later pkg can be augmented to "remove packages not explicitly installed" 
which would remove leaf packages.

Example: you installed "base-debug" which pulls in let's say 50 small 
packages, later you want all of those removed, you can do something 
like:  "pkg delete --leafs base-debug" which should delete "base-debug" 
and any dangling packages it pulled in not required by other pkgs.

Huge thanks to the team that implemented this!

thanks.
-Alfred

On 4/18/16 1:07 PM, Lev Serebryakov wrote:
> On 18.04.2016 22:40, Glen Barber wrote:
>
>> This granularity allows easy removal of things that may not be wanted
>> (such as *-debug*, *-profile*, etc.) on systems with little storage.  On
>> one of my testing systems, I removed the tests packages and all debug
>> and profiling, and the number of base system packages is 383.
>   IMHO, granularity like "all base debug", "all base profile" is enough
> for this. Really, I hardly could imagine why I will need only 1 debug or
> profile package, say, for csh. On resource-constrained systems NanoBSD
> is much better anyway (for example, my typical NanoBSD installation is
> 37MB base system, 12MB /boot and 10 packages), and on developer system
> where you need profiled libraries it is Ok to install all of them and
> don't think about 100 packages for them.
>
>   Idea of "Roles" from old FreeBSD installers looks much better. Again,
> here are some "contrib" software which have one-to-one replacements in
> ports, like sendmail, ssh/sshd, ntpd, but split all other
> FreeBSD-specific code? Yes, debug. Yes, profile. Yes, static libraries.
> Yes, lib32 on 64 bit system.
>
>    It seems that it is ideological ("holy war") discussion more than
> technical one...
>