David Naylor wrote: > Dear Jordan > > Recently I stumbled across a document you wrote in 2001, entitled "FreeBSD > installation and package tools, past, present and future". I find FreeBSD > appealing and I would like to contribute it its success, and as your article > describes, the installation and packaging system is lacking. Since the > installation system is being tackled under a SoC project I am hoping to give > the packaging system a go.
I've just read the document, and since I was also thinking about the ports/packages system lately, here are a few random ideas: - I think it's time to give up on using BDB+directory tree full of text files for storing the installed packages database, and I propose all of this be replaced by a single SQLite database. SQLite is public domain (can be slurped into base system), embeddable, stores all data in a single file, lightweight, fast, and can be used to do fancy things such as reporting. The current pkg_info's behaviour that takes *noticable* *time* to generate 1 line of output per package is horrible in this day and age. And the upcoming X11/X.Org 7.2 with cca 400 packages (which is in itself horrible just for a X11 system) will make it unbearable (also portupgrade which already looks slower by the day). - A quick test confirms that the current bsdtar will happily ignore any extra data at the end of a tgz/tbz archive, so package metadata can be embedded there, thus conserving existing infrastructure and being fast to parse. I suggest encoding this metadata in a sane and easy to parse XML structure. I cannot currently actively participate in implementing proposed things, but I can give advice on sqlite, database and xml schemas if anyone wants to...
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