On 2006-08-16, Pieter Dumon <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Well, that is exactly the goal of both pkgsrc and portage, isn't it ?
> (Both are meant to be portable over /runnable on any OS AND
> architecture).
>
> Gentoo Portage has a very BSD-ish philosophy (except for being GPL),
> and it has some 1000s of packages more than pkgsrc (on Linux that is)
I vividly disagree with these very common opinions. No Linux based
package manager system was designed to be a 3rd party package manager.
They are for managing every bit on the systems.
This *is* an important difference from ports-like systems. This effects
the layout of the dependency tree, might effect the dependencies of the
package management system itself. But the most important technical
difference is that they are not prefix clean (I think simply *none* of
them). They let everything meddle in the basic /{usr/,}{{s,}bin,lib}
hierarchy and that's a very bad idea IMHO. Especially on BSD.
And these things can't just be solved after an ah-ha! experience,
because not only the package management engine but the package handling
scripts themselves should be rewritten accordingly.
Eg, for portage ypu can find this dev branch:
http://gentoo-wiki.com/Portage-prefix, which is nice and dandy, but look
at the respective ebuild tree:
curl -s
http://gentoo.osuosl.org/experimental/snapshots/portage-alt-prefix-latest.tar.bz2
| \
tar tjf - | grep '^[^/]*/[^/]*/[^/]*/$' | wc -l
==> 119
Ain't that much impressive.
I think that still pkgsrc is the only cross platform package manager which is
suitable for managing third party packages. Portage might catch up, but
that will take several years.
Csaba
