Jonas Sundström wrote:
"Ryan Leavengood" <leavengood@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I haven't taken a lot of time to explore this system, but it does seem
pretty interesting. It also prompts some questions:
- How hard would it be to add Haiku as a supported platform for this?
This I don't know.
I think pkgsrc expects at least the 'bmake' utility.
It can build it itself. I think it expects only sh and cc.
We should continue distributing our own base, and not really on pkgsrc for this.- Would this be used to manage all the Unix-like utilities and applications currently shipping with BeOS R5?
They would most likely be available through pkgsrc, but updating them through pkgsrc could be discouraged,
or perhaps even blocked. (a Haiku-specific patch?)
It may be possible to limit pkgsrc to install to pkgsrc-onlyIt does this by default. Everything goes to /usr/pkg/ by default, though the path is user-selectable at build time.
locations, and thus not be able to overwrite BeOS/Haiku files.
...Yeah, though this shouldn't really be necessary for most things -- as I said, pkgsrc is completely self-contained.
- Would using pkgsrc result in an explosion of associated
directories which might clutter a filesystem or confuse novice users?
1)
A set of root level directories (the standard unix set) as
symlinks /xxx -> /boot/beos/unix/xxx would not be visible to a novice user, and most of us
long-time BeOS users would hardly ever see them either.
One of our old admins at work installed software this way, and it rapidly became an unmaintainable mess.These files would then be symlinked into a set of aggregation folders, IIRC, and any clashes be dealt with by the package utility.
It might be worth taking a look at. I don't know if it's great,
but it appeared to work.
Indeed. It pulls these from their authors' sites, as well as a list of mirrors as fallbacks. Binary packages for Haiku would need to be hosted somewhere, of course. The distfiles themselves are just the source tarballs and things distributed by the author. pkgsrc takes care of all required patching, configuration and dependency management.- Would we need to provide our own source for binary
packages for a Haiku pkgsrc? What about the need for both Intel and PPC binaries?
I believe pkgsrc pulls down distfiles, which contain all the source necessary to build a package. (To be installed,
or to be saved as a .tgz-ipped binary package.)
For PPC, as long as the pkgsrc utilities have been ported,Yes. Most of these issues, of course, are marked in pkgsrc already, and many of them are automatically patched if necessary. NetBSD being NetBSD, a lot of attention is paid to cross-platform issues.
there shouldn't be any problems beyond the cross-platform
issues of individual packages.
Because Haiku-only equivalents are not always available. There is an enormous array of amazingly useful UNIX software out there, and the ability to use these has made OS X amazingly attractive to the scientific community. I don't envision a lot of use of GUI apps, because we won't have X, but for command-line utilities, this would be an amazing thing to have.- Is there truly a desire or need to have the many hundreds of open
source Unix tools available to Haiku (especially when Haiku-only
equivalents are likely available?)
