Q: Pkgsrc sucks! A: Yes, I know. Q: But shouldn't we look at alternatives then? A: There is really none. We just can't take random packaing management system and modify to our needs. We don't have resources for that. Really, believe me. Btw, one of best ways to piss me off is to start discussion regarding this again.
Q: But I'm willing to do all the porting work myself! A: Unless you really do and make all these thousands packages build and work for us (pkgsrc have more than 8000 at the moment), don't expect to see any helping hand. Q: But how can I really help? A: That's the right question. There are several areas where I'd like to see a little help from community. * Not all packages which are there and building on DragonFly don't really work. I started to use http://bugs.dragonflybsd.org to track these issues (tagged with "pkgsrc" keyword). Take a issue, fix it and submit patches. * Not all packages build on DragonFly. Take a look at pbulk logs at http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~hasso/pbulk-logs/ to identify packages which don't build for some time (random failures are mostly fixed by the time you see the log). Note, that I will not accept patches to make build historic versions you might find in the pkgsrc. If you care, please update the package at first and then make it build and work on DragonFly. * There is a lot of packages in the pkgsrc which build and work fine, but only do because of patches applied from pkgsrc. It's really important that these patches will go into their upstreams really. Find a such package from pkgsrc tree, find out how to submit patches to the upstream and do it. But, please do it in polite way, submit patches against upstream repository, test it before submitting, explain non-obvious parts of patches (you can ask from me if you have problems understanding some parts of the patches) etc. Upstreams are mostly very friendly (there are exceptions of course) and fast pushing patches into releases, it's really only putting a little bit time and effort into it. "Take a look at these patches there, commit them or die!" isn't a polite way, btw ;). Thank you! -- Hasso Tepper