[nycbug-talk] ports systems. . .

[Louis Bertrand]

On Sat, 4 Sep 2004, G.Rosamond wrote:

> <not an attempt at starting a flame war>
>
> Ike and I had a long discussion this evening about ports systems. . .
>
> Certainly a ports system that operates on multiple platforms is
> desirable.
>
> The clear choices in the discussion are Darwin Ports v NetBSD's pkgsrc.
>
> darwin ports only has 1790 ports at this point, while pkgsrc has 4948.
>
> darwin ports operates on 4 platforms, pkgsrc runs on 10.
>
> Certainly, the simplification of ports across platforms would be hugely
> beneficial, although it would be hard to argue against the quantity
> available with FBSD's ports.  Widespread use with multiple platforms
> could mean better auditing outside of that done by the developers, plus
> other benefits, of course.
>
> Who is using Darwin ports on platforms other than OS X?  Who is using
> pkgsrc on platforms other than NetBSD?  I know Marc S had some insight
> on pkgsrc, and expressed utter delight. . .
>
> Again, this isn't about starting a flame war, but maybe we could even
> begin to articulate the strengths and shortcomings of both ports
> systems.
>
>
Maybe a bit off topic, but I'm getting annoyed at the ports concept because
of the shared library aspect. If a ports tree gets a bit crufty, you start
getting problems with shared libraries falling out of sync or, if you want
to update the shared lib to build a new port you end up having to update all
the ports that depend on it (woe to you if any are broken at the time).

With faster and faster systems with lots of memory, isn't it time more ports
got built staticly? Yes, it generates huge binaries, but for big applications
(e.g. Gimp, Mozilla) the load time is small compared to the time the application
is in use.

Ciao
 --Louis  <louis at bertrandtech dot ca>