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

On 19/04/2016 5:29 AM, Alfred Perlstein wrote:
> Guys please stop arguing about the number of packages.  The high 
> granularity is VERY useful!
>
it's going to make us a laughing stock
"look FreeBSD just split into 1.43 million packages" (effectively the 
same number.. it's bigger than 10)


> Managing large groups of small packages is much easier than just 
> having large packages.
err, Alfred, what planet do you live on? when they get out of sync it 
becomes a nightmare.
If you also had a packaging system that was smart enough to manage a 
hierarchy of packages then "maybe"..

>
> All this can be done by meta-packages which depend on larger package 
> groups.
Currently Metapackage is a way to make 10 packages look like 11 
packages.  The framework needs to understand to hide the 10 internal 
packages if they are part of a metapackage.
>
> 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!

I'm sure the work was large and will be useful in the future but we 
are not ready to have the system installed like this.
no-one wants to see 750 packages show up when you do an enquiry on a 
newly installed system.
I could live with:

base-utils    11.1
  - ktrace  uninstalled
  - tcpdump uninstalled
  + dd          11.1.1   (CVE-123412 fix)



but not
{700 packages )
dd  11.1.1 dd with CVE fix
{29 more packages}
[tcpdump line is not present but you don't notice that]
{10 more packages}
[ktrace line would be here but you don't notice that either]
{15 more packages}


In other words, I have no objection to all the utilities coming in the form of little packages.
but I have a major objection if that fact is at all obvious to the end user,
and certainly if we need to wade through 750 packages to see what's going on.

>
> 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...
>>
>
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