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NetBSD Packages Collection Releases A New Branch

Posted by timothy on from the like-a-giant-underground-fungus dept.

jschauma writes "On behalf of the pkgsrc team, Alistair Crooks announced today that a new pkgsrc-2004Q1 branch of the NetBSD Packages Collection was created last night, and the freeze on committing to the pkgsrc trunk is now over. This branch, which includes some 4518 actively-maintained and supported packages, introduces a self-hosted pkgsrc infrstructure as part of the ever growing support of even more operating systems as well as a number of other goodies. Please see Alistair's message to the netbsd-announce mailing list for details."

25 comments

  1. Packages by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting
    There are a few important points about any package management system that should be fulfilled.
    1. Packages should have all of their files independent from each other. Administering this type of system is far easier, as there's never any question where a file comes from.
    2. There is never any reason to recompile a package. Symlinks should enable all packages to have their dynamically linked libraries upgradeable without recompiling that package.
    3. There is never any reason to remove a package. Since the files are kept seperate, versioning problems don't exist. If nobody is using a version of a package, it can be removed. Otherwise there's no reason to bother.
    1. Re:Packages by endx7 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Your list is somewhat dependant on whoever wrote the original software. Ports/pkgsrc/etc are pretty much at the mercy of whoever wrote the software in the first place.

    2. Re:Packages by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      To a very large degree, yes, but look at how many packages use the GNU autoconf setup these days. A few new options to autoconf would fix most of these issues.

      Also, part of maintaining a ``package'' for a package managing distribution is installing it in a uniform manner. I'm just of the opinion that it would be better if that uniform manner used the file system to divide up the files by package. If it were done right, the installation scripts would only need to be written once (which has to be done now).

  2. Re:tired of bsd trolls :-( by HitScan · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Slashdot has to post BSD stories once in a while so they can act like a sponge for the retards to ruin and keep them from ruining all the other stories. The comments are useless on any BSD story, due to retard concentration. Allowing Anonymous posts doesn't help anything.

    --
    HitScan
  3. Re:tired of bsd trolls :-( by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I am writing a story on how extreme the opensource community acts towards others that don't agree with thier ideals. The BSD section is a perfect example of how immature the people in the opensouce movement are and Slashdot's apathy towards them supports my claims.

  4. Re:A clue for the "BSD is dying" trolls. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Oh dear god no, FreeBSD captures packets faster than Linux. Is this is the only thing that you could come up with where FreeBSD beat Linux?

  5. Re:A clue for the "BSD is dying" trolls. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Oh dear god no, FreeBSD captures packets faster than Linux. Is this is the only thing that you could come up with where FreeBSD beat Linux?

    Is the only thing that I could come up with, that "Linux, the network OS, has such poor high end networking support that BSD is faster even when Linux gets a kernel-mode head start?"

    Networking performance is what Linux and the BSD's are all about. Linux support in that area sucks and mature BSD really shows child-like Linux how to perform. Maybe Linux should have swallowed it's pride and KEPT the BSD TCP/IP stack.

    Maybe Linux will some day be a viable solution beyond shitty little appliances, when people stop competing with each other, re-inventing the wheel baddly, become educated in Computer Science and settle down to some good ideas. Has Linux settled on a VM system yet? Or is it still chopping and changing within "stable" trees?

  6. Re:A clue for the "BSD is dying" trolls. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You clearly are using old data. The new Linux TCP/IP stack implementation has been shown to out-perform the BSD one. It's even rumored that the BSD folks fudged their numbers when they discovered that their pride and joy couldn't quite perform as advertised.