> 1. What's the relationship between pkgin and pkgsrc? I find pkgin > *really* useful so far for a lot of things like OpenOffice, Firefox, > etc., which would have otherwise crippled my machine trying to compile > them. That said, I also have some applications compiled from pkgsrc. > Is it OK/acceptable to mix these two methods?
pkgin is one of a number of tools for managing pkgsrc. It's not required; it's just handy. > 2. Is there an equivalent of "pkgin" for managing compiled programs > from pkgsrc? I can surely see a likely use case of someone compiled a > load of applications from pkgsrc, and wanting to peridocially > recompile them if there's been a version increase in the pkgsrc > repository upstream. If I understand your question correctly, the equivalent of pkgin is pkgin. A precompiled pkgsrc program is (unless you change the default options) identical to one you compile yourself. > 3. Also, is there any merit to having a tool which would check either > pkgin or pkgsrc and suggest using a binary or compiled-from-source > based on if the binary file present matches the one to compile from > pkgsrc? I appreciate compilation might necessitate a reason other > than "because I can", but it might be a nice convenience. Does such a > tool exist? pkg_chk can do this, as do other tools. You may be interested in this page: http://wiki.netbsd.se/Tutorials#Pkgsrc Especially the "How to upgrade packages" link. > 4. I note that most of the ownership under "/usr/{src,pkgsrc}" is > owned by group "wheel". That's fine, since my non-root user account > is in this group; I also like to compile things as non-root and then > "sudo bmake install". Is this a recommended way of working? Do I > just "chmod -R g+w /usr", or is there some other preferred way? Most of pkgsrc is getting close to being able to be installed without root access. I've never worked with /usr/src as non-root, though.
