Thanks for your explanations, Robert, I now better understand some
issues I recently ran into.
As for the packaging system, it is certainly the greatest weakness of
the whole BSD family, not only NetBSD.
Am 11/05/2020 um 21:56 schrieb Robert Nestor:
I’m not sure if this is still true, but it was in the past.
The NetBSD installer used to get confused about partitioning if one was trying
to install a new NetBSD system on a disk that had previously contained an
installation of some other system like OpenBSD, FreeBSD or Linux. This was on
MBR partitioned disks the last time I ran into it. The simple solution was to
zero out the first 1000 blocks of the disk before attempting the NetBSD
installation at which point everything worked smoothly.
If this is still an issue it may be even more difficult with a disk that was
set up using GPT as it takes more than just zeroing out the first few blocks on
the disk to totally wipe out the GPT setup. It might be nice to have an option
in the Installer to “reset” a disk to an acceptable state for a NetBSD
installation.
As for the packaging system, it has generally gotten more difficult to do a
simple installation of packages on a new NetBSD system now that the package
system supports so many other systems. In the old days packages were built and
maintained for a particular NetBSD release. Now the package builds are in
quarterly archives designed for building and installation on multiple systems.
That’s nice because it greatly expands the number of people working on
packages, but the downside is that the quarterly archives are not all built
from source on a regular schedule so the package inter-dependencies can get all
messed up. An update in one package may cause installation issues for other
packages that depend on it and haven’t been rebuilt in the archive. I guess
there are multiple solutions: 1) doing a regular rebuild of everything in an
archive, 2)having some utility that would check for packages that are no longer
installable from the archive, 3)building packages yourself which takes time and
computer resources.
Pkg_comp is a nice utility for doing the third option. I have updated
documentation on how this can be done such that a user need only build the
packages they’re interested in installing on their system I contributed that
documentation to the WiKi some time ago, but I’m not sure it was ever accepted
and posted.
