Re: Ideas and questions on pkgsrc

[Aggelos Economopoulos <aoiko@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
> On Tue, 13 Apr 2010, Aggelos Economopoulos wrote:
> 
>>> talks about common packages to install via pkg_radd so people don't have
>>> to guess names.
>> Directing them towards pkg_search should help, no?
> 
> pkgin search
> 
> pkgin upgrade
> 
> pkgin list
> 
> If pkgin doesn't work well for you, please report the problems.

Yah, I guess I should have mentioned pkgin.

I have tried pkgin a few months ago and arrived to the conclusion that
it is too dangerous to be let out of the lab. I no longer have the
details around of course, but according to the irc logs what I run into was:

"ask it to install package A which depends on B, it tries to install B,
fails because an older version already exists, but goes on to force
install A anyway!"

After that I put it aside and strongly recommended people not to use it
for now (I'm not the only one who has had very bad experiences with
pkgin btw). This is hardly a corner case that can be shrugged off as a
regular bug IMHO. It is imperative that the package manager give up
rather than risk messing the system.

That said, earlier today I started browsing through pkgin's source code
and it looks very clean. I'll know more when I get to the interesting
parts of course but it certainly looks like a tool we'd want to invest
effort on. I just think it should display a big fat "This is ALPHA
software" warning and not go on until the user acknowledges having read
the warning :)

Aggelos