Am 13.07.12 01:10, schrieb Doug Barton:
On 07/12/2012 03:02 PM, Baptiste Daroussin wrote:
On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 11:48:41AM -0700, Doug Barton wrote:
I do not mean this e-mail to be in any way critical. I was told after
the new OPTIONS framework discussion that I should have asked questions
before the change, so I'm asking these questions now; in a genuine
attempt to get information.
On 07/12/2012 03:01 AM, Baptiste Daroussin wrote:
In the time that you have been working on this project I have asked
numerous times for you(pl.) to answer the following questions:
1. What are the goals for pkg?
The why part of this mail should reply this question, no?
Well clearly not, because if it did I wouldn't keep asking the same
questions over and over again. :)
Anyway the goal is to have a decent package manager, providing modern features:
repositories, decent dependency tracking, decent reverse dependency tracking,
managing upgrade correctly (I'll explain this more later), provide a decent
library for third party tools (desktop integration via PackageKit for example)
I don't know what "decent" means. I don't know what "modern features"
means (beyond the buzzwords that you've included).
Providing easy package management for enterprise
Having set up package management systems for enterprises before, *this*
is actually a big-picture goal that I have a lot of sympathy for. But
again, what's missing is *details* about here is what large enterprises
need to make things work for them, here's why the existing tools don't
meet those needs, and here is how pkg does meet them.
(who never got problems
managing packages on a large set of freebsd servers, and how complicated it is
on FreeBSD to have automated reliable puppet,salt,chef,cfengine like tools)
One of the proof of this problem is how fast people integrated pkgng in those
tools.
This gets to the heart of my biggest fear regarding this whole project.
It's new, it's shiny, and it looks like forward progress is being made.
Thus, it's attracted a lot of attention, input, time, etc. Heck, it may
even BE forward progress, but I don't know how to measure that because I
don't know what the goals of the project are. Thus, my fear is that
without *details* about what the project is, and what it's trying to
accomplish, we're going to put an exponentially larger volume of work
into the transition and end up no closer to the goal of having a mature
package management system.
And just to be clear, I am *not* saying that "pkg sucks" or that it's
bad, or wrong, or anything else. I'm saying that I don't know how to
evaluate it, because you haven't given us a criteria by which to measure
it.
So what's the problem? We *desperately* need a better system for ports
and packages. We only have so many person-hours we can devote to making
that happen. If we spend all of them on pkg, and it ends up not helping
us enough, we've burnt out our volunteers for no good reason.
I am using pkg_* tools since '94 and I am using portmaster for ports/pkg
maintainance for years: pkg_* tools are a pain in the ass in the view of
an administrator. I use it only and partly on fresh installs and doing
further security auditing with portaudit and upgrading with portmaster -
most time upgrading from source. But only, because its simply not
possible the same way with the pkg_* tools.
Because I manage dozens of installation across Europe, buildind and
updating from ports will be more and more time consuming. portmaster is
really a great tool to take control of this lack of features in pkg_*
tools , but I am running out of time more and more.
I was also a bit concerned and reserved to pkgng. But I am also in
contact with some local FreeBSD ports committers and one of them (decke)
told me some stories about pkgng and poudriere. I saw the talk from Beat
Gätzi (beat) at EU BSD Day 2012 about pkgng and was I see was really
nice and made me courious. So I tried to setup a small build environment
with poudriere and pkgng to evaluate an substitution for my traditional
pkg/port security upgrading with portmaster.
Finally I think, I can complete replace portmaster with pkgng, poudriere
and an self build and maintained pkg repository. This will save a huge
amount of time in future and allow to roll out security updates for
packages really fast and easy.
So pkgng is not designed as a replacement for portmaster, but now it
allows me to work without it on most of my installations.
I know almost any of the "Linux Enterprise" package management features,
pkg_* tools a far away from this kind of functionality, even with the
support of the great portmaster tool. Bug pkgng improves much more.
Its a very complex problematic. Yes documentation is not so good as it
could be. But I saw the talks from beat in live, saw the screencasts
from bapt on Youtube and finally I tried it on my own. It was necessary
to try it out and see it, feel it, smell and taste it.
I think its good work from admin and enterprise point of view.
Doug has written portmaster and integrated package handeling, which I
only use rarely on my old desktop. Why was this handling integrated in
portmaster and not in pkg_* tools?
I know its something unkown and new and I had also my problems with the
idea of pkgng for the first time (why reinventing the wheel...) - but I
tried it out and it works really really well.
My opinion after 18 years of FreeBSD administration.
Regards,
Michael
--
Mit freundlichen Grüßen
Ing. Michael Ranner
GSM: +43 676 4155044
Mail: mich...@ranner.eu
WWW: http://www.azedo.at/
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