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The BSDs Need A Unified Package Collection

Posted by michael on from the try-UPS-Blue dept.

qbasicprogrammer writes "Chris Coleman wrote to Daily Daemon News suggesting a unified package collection. Currently OpenBSD, NetBSD, and FreeBSD maintain separate ports/package trees. Chris points out the various BSD package collections all carry different versions Mozilla; a common ports system would certainly benefit everyone."

1 of 15 comments (clear)

  1. I Agree, but who will start it? by PerlStalker · · Score: 4

    I'm all for the unified ports collection. I think that it could be done using the macros etc. described in the comments at daemonnews or something similar.

    The catch is, as posted at DN, is that I don't think that any one of the BSDs are going to start it themselves. (BSDi might try, if for nothing else but the publicity.) I agree with one of the previous posters, it will probably need to be an "independent" group working on a "limited" number of ports. If that group can prove that what it comes up with works, then it would be easier to convince the ports maintainers to adopt the system and WHAMO! we have a unified ports collection.

    Regarding concerns about the different focus of each BSD, a system can be developed the will allow an admin to configure the ports to do what s/he wants.

    It was suggested elsewhere that a NOT_AUDITED flag could be used for those packages that are not audited for security. However, even OpenBSD doesn't audit their ports collection.

    From the OpenBSD website: "The ports & packages collection does NOT go through the thorough security audit that OpenBSD follows. Although we strive to keep the quality of the packages collection high, we just do not have enough human resources to ensure the same level of robustness and security."

    The NetBSD crew can have a flag like PORT_UNTESTED to say that the package has not been tested to run on every platform.

    Something can be done with each of focus that will allow an admin to say "I only want security audited programs that can run on everything NetBSD can."

    Developers/maintainers can add a flag to the packages like BUILT4_FreeBSD or BUILT4_RHLINUXEMU so admins can configure their setup to not build anything that doesn't build for their platform (of flavor of Linux Emulator.)

    If you want to get something like this started, let me know. We can try to organize something and invite some of the ports maintainers from all of the BSDs. Let's not let a good idea disapear because no one did anything.

    PerlStalker