pkgng Beta

wblock@

Developer
From the ports-announce mailing list:

[HEADSUP][CFT] pkgng beta1 is out

Baptiste Daroussin

1/ Why pkgng?
------------

Our current pkg_install tools are showing their age, are hard to maintain,
and they lack features:

- missing metadata
- no upgrade support
- no repository support
- no fine dependency tracking
- no modern binary package management
- and many others

Having old tools makes it hard to improve the ports infrastructure, as a
result lots of hacks have found their way into the different Mk/bsd.*.mk
files to work around pkg_install limitations plus there are lots of hacks
in the packages metadata itself such as @comment which are not comments,
and so forth.

We have people writing tools to improve the situation (portmaster and
portupgrade to name two), but they are limited by and can become quite
complicated to maintain because of the pkg_install limitations.

2/ What it is?
--------------

It is a tool that is designed to replace pkg_install and provide modern
features to advance package management on FreeBSD.
...

Full 250-line message here
 
Sounds good. Also some mechanism/hooks to peculiar upgrade situations would be nice to model. There must be such a mechanism if source compilation continues to be the main way of doing it.
 
It sounds as though /usr/src/UPDATING is still going to be part of the ports implementation. I'm only just beginning to get a hang of using the ports system (with respect to upgrading - initial installs have been fine), so I haven't seen a really deep UPDATING entry, but the one's I've seen so far are along the lines of "X is depricated so uninstall X and use Y from now on", or "X has been split up into Y and Z so install and recompile -R and -r dependencies".
These types of workarounds look like they could be automated. Is there any reason why that isn't happening? I did a quick search on UPDATING documentation but couldn't really find any, if anybody has any links to shed light on it that would be great too.

Also, could someone post a complex UPDATING entry? That would probably show me.
 
achix said:
Sounds good. Also some mechanism/hooks to peculiar upgrade situations would be nice to model. There must be such a mechanism if source compilation continues to be the main way of doing it.
I agree, and I add: we don't need the same old third party, command line tool again.

All this situation it is simply to solve like I said before: just FreeBSD Foundation have to invest on a binary upgrade server updated in the same time with the ports code collection and build a simple tool to use that server. Graphical is better, text is ok too.

So I'm totally disinterested in that new third party project called pkgng and I haven't want to try it.
 
piggy: pkgng is *exactly* what you are asking for. If you would take your head out of the sand for 10 seconds, you would notice that. Everything you have been screaming repeatedly over and over again about ... is being done in pkgng. With the sole exception of being graphical.

But, I guess you just want to rant and rave over and over again about the same point, instead of actually investigating possible solutions and getting things done.
 
Bombdiggity I can't wait to test this. I have first hand experience (read: pain) with the brokenness of pkg_install. :p
 
phoenix said:
piggy: pkgng is *exactly* what you are asking for. If you would take your head out of the sand for 10 seconds, you would notice that. Everything you have been screaming repeatedly over and over again about ... is being done in pkgng. With the sole exception of being graphical.

But, I guess you just want to rant and rave over and over again about the same point, instead of actually investigating possible solutions and getting things done.
Ok Phoenix, I will try it as fast as I have some spare time and a machine to experiment with.
 
It is really very good in action. I did some tests on a old desktop that I have. Setting up x11/xorg-minimal was a matter of a few minutes. The only problem is that I have found only 2 repositories which have vey old packages.
 
The database backend side of things work really well.

The patch to portmaster to make it use the pkgng database works really well.

Unfortunately, there's no i386 package repo available anywhere, so that's as far as I've been able to test. For now, I'll continue to use pkg_upgrade (from sysutils/bsdadminscripts). It's not perfect (and slow), but at least it works with the existing packages.

Definitely a lot of potential in pkgng!!
 
There's beta 2 already. But I'm not sure, but I think there's a bug in a patch for portmaster. Having patched it, it still wanted to upgrade the ports according to what pkg_version shows. I read through the patch and ran
Code:
export use_pkgng=1
which made portmaster run as it should. That's why I think that there should be some if that would set the value of use_pkgng.
 
Beta3 is already here. I would run
Code:
 portmaster check-depends && pkgdb -F --omit-check
first if convenient. (Less errors running the following code box)...(BTW Found one port which had to be removed temporarily for )
Code:
 pkg2ng
( to run to completion. ) (Using unpatched portmaster so far... not a lot of time to test.)
Also,
Code:
 script -a pkg2ng.log pkg2ng
found many conflicts... such as weblint; p5-HTML-Lint etc etc ("they install into the same place" a file)
 
To keep
Code:
pkgdb -F --omit-check
around... unsure of its exact replacement with other tools... (It informs of stuff I've accidentally desinstalled, for instance.)
 
jb_fvwm2 said:
To keep
Code:
pkgdb -F --omit-check
around... unsure of its exact replacement with other tools... (It informs of stuff I've accidentally desinstalled, for instance.)

What about # portmaster --check-depends ?
 
Does it work good enough so that I could install Xorg and a small window manager with pkgng and get the same versions as I get from ports?
 
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