On Tue, Oct 06, 2009 at 12:12:34PM +0400, Alexander Bubnov wrote: > Hello everybody! > > Probably I am going to ask a stupid question but it is very interesting for > me. Because I would like to help BSD projects. > Why OpenBSD does not use pkgsrc of NetBSD project as default ports? I guess > work can be faster in case port system is shared between BSD projects > including FreeBSD. NetBSD ports are ported to many Oses so I would prefer > these port system.
You may read about philosophical differences between pkgsrc and our ports system from the interview Mark Espie (the father of OpenBSD ports) gave for the tenth anniversary of pkgsrc http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/10years.html I will give you couple more practical reasons. I was able to bootstrap pkgsrc on 4.4 and consider myself one of the few who in the recent past have played with pkgsrc on OpenBSD. It took some searching of NetBSD mailing lists for me to bootstrap pkgsrc on OpenBSD due to a nasty bug observed by NetBSD developers. Once bootstrap, I could not reliably build any application which required X to run. The problem was of course that NetBSD was still using XFree86. Now there was an option which will allow you to use native X server but that would not make port building any more reliable. Things might have improved a bit as they switched to XOrg. pkgsrc to my knowledge has not been tested by a single pkgsrc developer since 3.7 (according to NetBSD mailing lists). It is kind a fanny that they expect pkgsrc just to work without any testing. Don't you think so? There are two common arguments used by people who in the past (2004 and earlier) have used or at least tried to use pkgsrc on OpenBSD. One is the number of ports (pkgsrc officially has more ported software) and the second one is ability to tweak the application. The first claim doesn't hold the water. Just browse trough pkgsrc and you will see that most of their software is much older than our current port three. Often the pkgsrc has not been updated for ages. Often large peaces of software has been broken in many peaces giving you the impression that they have more stuff. Speaking of tweaking it is absolutely unnecessary for common users. IMHO the one who need real tweaking will have no problem to use OpenBSD ports system and to tweak the specific application to their liking. Speaking non-Wintel architectures I will wage you $100 that I will build more software using our ports three on SGI, SUN, or even VAX than you will be able to do that with pkgsrc. I do not want to sound all negative. pkgsrc is a fine packaging system but I would like to see a person who could reliably build software with it outside of NetBSD and DragonFly platforms. In all honestly it is very portable but that doesn't mean that it can be used on OpenBSD platform or any other platform for that matter without serious testing and bug hunting. You can trace the pain of DragonFly developers from their mailing listand how much effort went into making pkgsrc fully functional on DragonFly after they made the decision to adopt pkgsrc as the official package management. Best, Predrag
