After the flood of Fedora Core 6 and Ubuntu 6.10 reviews, here is a review of PC-BSD 1.3 Beta. "PC-BSD has improved quite a bit and the use of its open-source PBI packaging system is a great idea. Although it obviously means there might be a minor delay in newly released products being ported over to the PBI package system, novice users will rejoice because the wait is well worth it. PC-BSD is a well oiled machine with its quick response times, even if you don't have that much memory in your system. Its implementation of a clean interface is welcomed by me and not having a 3D enabled desktop is not something I really would worry about unless you are an eye-candy lover."
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Member since:2005-06-29
Member since:2005-09-10
Does that clarify matters? Do I still sound like a FUDing, lying, harping troll? ;-)
Yes, it clarifies matters. A bit. 
Now if you are interested... FreeBSD has a hybrid system: ports and packages. You can easily build a binary package from ports (as easily as passing "-p" to portinstall/portupgrdade - and a binary package will land in /usr/ports/packages). These packages will be - for all intents and purposes - very similar to your .deb or .rpm. They know about dependencies, and the pkg_* system will try to resolve them automatically. How PBIs relate to this? If you check out a PBI creation howto, you'll find out that they use binary (.tbz) FreeBSD packages (that are regularly built from ports by the FreeBSD package building clusters).
So they took those packages (or use one build by himself - I did it with all the packs I maintained) - and check what runtime dependencies they have. These fall into two categories: they are either 100% present on all PC-BSD installs or not. The former is a much much larger group then the latter, and only in the latter case will you need to include some extra libs. You can do a real life comparison of PBIs and RPMs - and you will see very small size differences (see openoffice.org) - because most shared libraries PBIs need are counted on to be present on your system.
So that's it. Basically PBIs have one (BIG) dependency and one extra feature (compared to .rpm or .deb): the dependency is PC-BSD, and the extra feature is the possibility to include extra libs in the binary. That's all what PBIs are, and it would be relatively easy to implement such a system for any linux - it's just that noone tried it yet. Whether PC-BSD and the PBI system lives or dies is yet to be seen. But it won't fail because of the reasons you cited. That was a bit dramatic, I mean your rant about missing shared library support and the inevitable doom of the PBI concept as a consequence, but so were my replies 
Especially when I saw you repeating things that I know were not true, and I thought you deliberately ignore my clarifications (which in my book, would classify you as a troll). Maybe I was wrong. If so, than I apologize.
But I think that the BSD folks will be able to come up with something better.
They already did Yes, yes, I'm obviously biased, but the ports/packages infrastructure is way better then any package management I have found in the *nix world. It's not just source build ala gentoo - it's a whole infrastructure. Check out freshports.org to see what I mean. And its a maintenance paradise: I maintain a small comp lab with a few freebsd desktops (old machines with limited functionality, newer machines are WindowsXP). I build binary packages on my own machine by simply passing -p to portinstall. The binary packages are automatically arranged exactly the same way as on the official binary repositories (under /usr/ports/packages) so all I have to do is point those old machines to my FTP server, and everything will be installed/updated from my puter, with a single command. Wonderful And it takes almost nothing. Normally I use portinstall whatnot or portupgrade -a to maintain my home computer, and the only effort I have to make to keep several machines up to date is to use portinstall -p whatnot and portupgrade -ap instead.
Member since:2005-07-24
"""They already did Yes, yes, I'm obviously biased, but the ports/packages infrastructure is way better then any package management I have found in the *nix world. It's not just source build ala gentoo - it's a whole infrastructure."""
I'm obviously biased, as well.
Like I've said before... let's watch and see how well it does in the real world.
Take care,
Steve
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The Verge pointed me to a blog post by Leap Motion - which reveals how their Kinect-like motion control works with Windows 8. "From the second you plug in your Leap Motion Controller, you'll be able to browse the web and interact with your computer just by moving your hands and fingers in the air. With Leap Motion technology and Windows, you can do everything that's possible with multi-touch inputs - without actually touching anything. This also means that existing applications in Windows 7 and 8 will respond to your natural hand and finger movements. Soon, we'll show you how Leap Motion will work with Mac OS X." Quite cool.PocketNow interviews Marc Dillon, and there's an interesting note about why Jolla is keeping the display properties under wraps: "We're leaving some of those details out because we do understand that there are a lot of really big players in the market and they tend to take certain components in the market and dominate them. We created the ability to actually be able to run Sailfish on multiple hardware displays and be able to swap components, so this is part of the demand and supply planning phase. We are committed to this industrial design which is a 4.5-inch display, an 8 megapixel camera on the back and a front-facing camera at the front, and the exact specs of the display we'll provide when we're close to delivery." Something you rarely hear anything about.
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Member since:
2005-07-24
"""Well, I thought it might catch your attention that way
"""
It did. ;-)
"""I can't reply with "we, in the BSD community" simply because this is not a sect or something, and I'm not qualified to represent the BSD community as such."""
That's reasonable. I was wrong to try to speak for the Linux community. It makes me sound like Eric Raymond and I am suitably embarrassed. ;-)
"""I consider this trolling. FUD is also an apt term for what you do: you harp about the doom of PC-BSD, while spreading obvious lies about its package management."""
Hmmm. Those are harsh words. "Trolling", "FUD". "harp", "lies".
I know more about PBI now than I did at the beginning of this thread. It's not as bad as I thought it was at first. But I think that the BSD folks will be able to come up with something better. Something less source-centric than ports, but less binary-centric than PBI. That's a compliment.
For a few posts now, I have been saying that I am content to wait and watch how well PBI does relative to other package management systems.
Does that clarify matters? Do I still sound like a FUDing, lying, harping troll? ;-)