On 2007-05-05 at 17:20 -0500, Peter da Silva wrote: > This is one of the advantages to the BSD core+ports system and the way it > separates the core from add-on packages. It's got its own hatefulness, of > course, but I'd rather have some redundant and normally unused stuff in core > even with the occasional "which perl am I using anyway".
As regards Perl, I'm happy with the way that FreeBSD 6 moved Perl out of core. Sure, if you install X11 from the CD then the package dependency pushes Perl 5.6 on you, but if you pkg_add later, or are doing a server, then you have the freedom to just install Perl 5.8 in the first place and avoid the entire issue. Now, if there were a completely clean way to do the same for library packages which exist in both core and ports. For OpenSSH, NO_OPENSSH in /etc/make.conf and WITH_OVERRITE_BASE works just fine. But when you start to deal with OpenSSL or Heimdal, you're facing issues with a lack of distinction between "don't make and install this when you make world" and "don't allow dependencies upon this". Especially with some of the header file changes in Heimdal which affect the ability of core to build if you're trying to use Ports; if you try to keep both core and ports Heimdals around then you'll have fun debugging cases where Ports software can't handle the two distinct sets of libraries and headers and the Port maintainer can't do much about it without more cooperation from upstream. I've yet to find a system which makes me _happy_ about its package management, only those which provide the least pain and suffering. And no, MacOS doesn't cut it -- those Spotlight extensions can't be installed by drag+drop "everything in a folder under /Applications/" and then finding out that there are apparently no manifests to allow deletion of .mpkg stuff. Hello, if I wanted to manually chase down cruft left over from installs then I'd be running Windows. At least the installer doesn't mean directly running executables as a privileged user. Except when it does, because there are checker scripts. My memory is trying to convince me that the Amiga Installer was less painful in every regard, but I'm sure it's lying to me since I only dealt with it as a user back then. -Phil
