3 Replies to “Packaging material”

1. I am just a young programmer…but I thought I would comment that I really like some of the ideas here. I have used a truly disturbing number of packaging systems and this would be a step up from even the best of them. I especially like the idea of cleaning up shared libs that are no longer needed.

2. Well, everyone here wants it to be at least as nice as FreeBSD Ports with the semi-sanctioned portupgrade (pkgtools) package, which does it to some extent already. ;)

   [portupgrade/portinstall will naturally tidy seemingly-obsolete things to /usr/local/lib/compat/pkg, and portsclean -L will do the same, while the unrelated? libchk utility will attempt to tell you what the binaries on your system are actually linked to, independent of what Ports and the pkgdb believes… at which point you’re left to choose what to delete by hand, for safety’s sake. Maybe you don’t want to have to rebuild libtakes_forever_to_compile in a week… or blow away the version everything on the binary package repository might be linked against… even if nothing references it right now.]

   Of course, if you do things like blindly cleaning the compat/pkg directory without knowing what you’re doing, you’ll discover pretty much every port added to your box was linked against an old version of gettext, one too-new to have been built as a binary for your world, and too old to be At which point you quickly learn how to pull a backdated port skeleton from CVS. ;) ( On a related note, someone just coughed up a script to use Ports that way normally, and since it doesn’t have a name, here’s the URI: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/5025 )

   —

   I just took a stare at some apt documentation, and there’s probably a way to emulate the pkgtools behavior, though you’d have to “use a little *NIX” rather than getting it in a script. (A script for it, in turn, might be trivial to write… but unless I’m smoking crack, the runtime linking in Linux makes the case for the *rest* of pkgtools less common, at the expense of some performance. Maybe. Don’t quote me, I don’t know what I’m talking about. ;))

3. Whoops.

   “Of course, if you do things like blindly cleaning the compat/pkg directory without knowing what you’re doing, you’ll discover pretty much every port added to your box was linked against an old version of gettext, one too-new to have been built as a binary for your world, and too old to be available *in the current ports tree.*”

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