One of the problems that people have had is that 'make pkgsrc-create'
downloads the current version of pkgsrc, which, if pkgsrc happens to be
going through some work, may not have a lot of working packages for
DragonFly. (or any platform, for that matter.)
I use the quarterly pkgsrc builds for building the binary pkgsrc
repository, since they are known to be stable, and I get a lot more
packages built.
This is a further problem for people who used 'make pkgsrc-create' or
'make pkgsrc-update' later; it's easy to add packages using pkg_radd, but
there's often some dependency that requires building from source for
whatever reason, and you end up in upgrade hell since the version from
source and the binary versions you download can be out of sync.
Here's my proposal: Let's change the lines in /usr/Makefile that say:
cd ${.CURDIR}/pkgsrc && git branch vendor origin/vendor
cd ${.CURDIR}/pkgsrc && git checkout vendor
to:
cd ${.CURDIR}/pkgsrc && git branch pkgsrc-2010Q2 origin/pkgsrc-2010Q2
cd ${.CURDIR}/pkgsrc && git checkout pkgsrc-2010Q2
(doesn't have to be 2010Q2, that's just what's available now)
The advantages:
- People have a lot more working packages, whether building from source or
via download
- Installing via pkg_radd and via bmake can be intermixed freely.
- pkgsrc works 'out of the box'.
Disadvantages:
- Someone has to update a line in /usr/Makefile to move to the next
quarterly release of pkgsrc.
That's not really a disadvantage, because we didn't have a clear upgrade
method before.
This follows POLA; the worst thing that happens is that someone is
building from a no-longer-updated branch, instead of having packages that
can't build or download, or having the install of a new package trigger
version mismatches in a bunch of others.
I like this idea more now that I've typed it out and thought about it; any
objections?
