On Thu, 5 Nov 2015, Jonathan Perkin wrote:
What backend does pkgin use?
libfetch.
I often have problems with pkgin downloads. For some odd reason, in the
middle of my downloads it often just hangs (--stalled--). It's usually
when it's right in the middle of a file. I have to ctrl-c, then restart
pkgin (ie.. just up-arrow and try again). It always succeeds on retry then
usually stalls out again later on another file.
If I download the same files from the same place using aria2c or wget, it
always works fine and if it does stall, I can reproduce the stall with any
other tool to verify it's some problem with the remote site or my route
there, and not simply that the tool got "tired" (sorry, don't know what
else to call that) and simply stalled out for no visible reason.
I'm not saying it's specific to pkgin/libfetch, but the little evidence
I've seen points that way, since other tools can grab the same list of
files without stalling. It's an intermittent issue that mainly seems to
happen with larger files. If it was a network/NIC issue, wouldn't the
other tools exhibit the same behavior?
Can we force it to use wget?
No, but you are welcome to wget files into the cache manually if you
wish.
While I completely understand the desire to keep it all self-contained, I
certainly wouldn't have minded if there was an option to use a different
download method internal to the tool. You are right to point out that one
could populate the cache, but you understand that'd require you to find
the URL, manually map out the package dependencies, and download them all
manually without the benefit of the tool supplying the URLs (which it
certainly knows since it has to feed them to libfetch).
BTW, I hope I don't come across as complaining. I'm happy as a lark that
we now have pkgin and other than this one little quirk that might be
specific to my setup (or who knows maybe I'm doing something wrong), it's
a pretty fantastic tool. I've had far worse experiences with the Python
script that is "yum". I know folks are volunteers with the NetBSD project
and I'm not trying to insult anyone's work. I'm just saying that I have
seen pkgin misbehave in this one minor way.
Thanks,
Swift
