The NetBSD Project recently released NetBSD 5.0, the 13th major release of its Unix operating system. If you are not familiar with the BSD mentality, it's a back-to-basics approach. In this gallery we go from install to running a GNOME desktop in a virtualised VMware instance. This process is console-based.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2007-04-20
What are you whining about? Pkgsrc works very well on NetBSD and other Unix OSes. You have a robust and consistent framework for building the same software on BSD, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, etc.
What makes you say there are no binary packages? Have you even looked? Go to ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/ there are binary packages for NetBSD and a few other OSes like Solaris and QNX. There aren't any NetBSD-5 binary packages, I think because version 5 has been recently released, so they're in the process of building them. If there aren't any packages for your specific architecture, you can always build them from source, it's quite easy with pkgsrc.
Pkgsrc tools are very consistent and they all have manpages. They are already installed with the base system on NetBSD, or they get installed when you bootstrap pkgsrc on other OSes. Tools under pkgsrc/pkgtools directory are extra tools and are not required for basic package management, they can have whatever names their developer chooses, because they're not core tools.
I think you're missing the point of pkgsrc. It's supposed to work cross-platform and is a very nice framework if you have to administer different Unix OSes, like Linux, Solaris and BSD. In my opinion, the fact that pkgsrc is cross-platform doesn't interfere with it's consistency, or flexibility. Quite the opposite, because it supports so many different platforms, more people tend to use it and submit bug reports and patches, which improves the quality of software.
Member since:2007-03-02
dbolgheroni - "No binary packages. "
rom508 - "" rel="nofollow">ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/"
I was about to jump in a correct dbolgheroni on pkgsrc, but I see you're already on the job... way to go rom508!
Bradley
Edited 2009-05-14 17:50 UTC
Member since:2005-08-27
Member since:2007-01-18
Member since:
2007-01-18
One thing I used to like in the past was pkgsrc. But if you use a simple and consistent package manager like ports in OpenBSD, you'll see the difference.
The pkgsrc approach to support every package on every archictecture and on every OS (oh!) seems too bad for pkgsrc. And for users too. Why not just support NetBSD? It would make things easier. The OpenBSD approach is a lot smarter: "We have few developers, we will do this way because it's better for us.".
In pkgsrc, there are a lot of ways for doing the same thing, and no real consensus on why doing this way is better than doing that way. There are a lot of package tools which is in fact a third party package, e.g. in pkgsrc/pkgtools directory, meaning you have more than one tool to do the same thing.
Also, no consensus on the syntax of the tools like underscore, e.g. pkg_add and pkgclean (the last a package in pkgtools/), however.
No binary packages.
I think there is no better word than that: pkgsrc isn't consistent. I do appreciate that. A lot. And for an OS, it's essential to have a good (and consistent) package manager.