"10 Years ago - on October 3rd 1997 - the pkgsrc software management system was created by Alistair Crooks and Hubert Feyrer. pkgsrc, the NetBSD Packages Collection, was intended primarily as a packaging system for NetBSD. Derived from the FreeBSD Ports system, pkgsrc became a success story. Today, pkgsrc is a cross-platform framework, running on the BSDs, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, many Unix derivatives, and even on QNX and Windows. Ports- and pkgsrc-like software build frameworks are today standard on the BSDs and quite popular on some newer Linux distributions. In 2005 pkgsrc was adopted as the package management system for DragonFly BSD. Presently, pkgsrc provides more than 7300 stable packages. We continue the anniversary celebrations with a series of interviews: developers and users of pkgsrc and of related systems give insights into the history, the concepts, the problems and the future directions of packaging systems."
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Quite a good selection of interviews that provides lots of information about the current state and the future of software management especially (but not only) in BSD operating systems. Recommended reading for anyone interested in software and package management solutions.
Also, despite personally being a loyal Ubuntu, Debian and thus apt-get/aptitude/Synaptic/dpkg user for many years, I find pkgsrc very nice and advanced too. No wonder that also some Linux distros have started using and experimenting with pkgsrc too.
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When you can upgrade an entire system as easily as with
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
pkgsrc might be worth something. Then again, I'm blatantly against the myriad of package management systems that exist for UNIX/Linux. A single standard would go a long way in my book.
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The problem lies not in the multiplicity of package managers, but in the multiplicity of package trees and the way those trees are generated.
For example, if you could automatically transform Gentoo's Portage tree into a Debian repository and vice-versa, the choice of which package manager to use would be irrelevant.
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You could do it of course, physically, but the difference is of course the package management system *and* the repository.Because the latter reflects the idea behind an operating system. No one using e.g. Gentoo would be happy with apt-get/aptitude, nobody at FreeBSD would be for example happy with some patches in Gentoo and so on. It's more than just a different software, it's sometimes a philosophy in terms of quality, freedom, KISS, whatever else.
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No one using e.g. Gentoo would be happy with apt-get/aptitude, nobody at FreeBSD would be for example happy with some patches in Gentoo and so on.
Maybe, but there is also a lot of duplicate work going on. E.g. I know people who package for RPM systems, but also look at Debian packages/patches/bug reports frequently. I suppose that happens the other way around as well.
It would be nice if at the very least bugs and patches could be tracked easily cross-distribution or cross-system.
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It would be nice if at the very least bugs and patches could be tracked easily cross-distribution or cross-system.
I believe Debian's bts-link is a step in the right direction.
http://bts-link.alioth.debian.org/
It allows one to track Bugzilla, SourceForge, Savannah, Trac, Mantis, Gnats, RT from Debian BTS. No, I don't think Launchpad is the right idea, due to its centralized nature.
Full disclosure: I'm one of bts-link developers.
Edited 2007-10-21 01:00
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pkgsrc is not a source code repository,
pkgsrc is an entire package system created with a lot of makefiles, those makefiles are in charge to download the source code from its original repositories, compile them and install them.
DragonFly [another BSD OS] uses pkgsrc as its main package system and, thus, uses the same pkgsrc tree found in ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub; so, I think DracoLinux must use the same approach.
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