On Wed, Dec 03, 2003 at 12:08:33AM -0800, Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
> On Mon, 1 Dec 2003, Perry E.Metzger wrote:
>
> > party". Our pkgsrc infrastructure exists to make it easy to compile
> > third party software, but we do not claim that Emacs and /bin/ls are
> > supported the same way.
> >
> > We've got about 4500 packages in pkgsrc -- a fraction of the number
> > some folks like Debian support, but quite a number -- and in the
>
> Counting packages doesn't work well. Debian splits up many, many software
> suites into separate packages, such as docs, libraries, programs/
> executables, development headers, and shared data. It is common to have
> one package in pkgsrc be represented by three-or-more Debian packages.
> Only for a few packages in pkgsrc are they split up. (I do agree that
> separating big software into seperate packages is a good idea -- I use new
> freedesktop.org xlibs which is in over 15 packages.)
A somewhat more accurate way to check (though still not perfect) is to
check the number of Debian *source* packages - which are roughly
equivalent to what appear as packages in pkgsrc.
[ Updated 5 minutes ago ]
$ cd /var/lib/apt/lists
$ grep "^Package:" http.us.debian.org_debian_dists_*_Sources |
sort | uniq | wc -l
8030
This is fairly noticeably less than the 12k or so binary packages that are
floating around (I don't have an unstable box handy to check the exact
count). True, it's still larger than NetBSD, but that isn't necessarily a
good thing, as the latest "Bits from the RM" hints at.
> > course of making them all work we routinely find that we have to fix
> > things in NetBSD. For example, programs like xmms have inspired many
> > changes to our threads system.
>
> Another thing that is interesting is that most of pkgsrc is usable on
> non-NetBSD systems. Many admins use it to have a consistent third-party
> software installation method under Solaris and Linux. pkgsrc is used (or
> has been used) under BSD/OS, Mac OS X, Darwin OS, Irix, FreeBSD, OpenBSD,
> HP-UX, and others. In fact, one pkgsrc developer is beginning to use
> pkgsrc (via mingw compiler) to provide software for Windows platforms.
>
> I even use pkgsrc to build and install Linux the kernel, glibc, iptables,
> vixie-cron, shadow, all components of my Linux distribution. (A few of
> these pkgsrc packages are not in pkgsrc or pkgsrc-wip yet though.)
Of course, the same is true of dpkg/apt; with fairly minor changes, dpkg /
apt can be built on nearly any modern POSIX system (in fact, the only issue
with NetBSD was a non-POSIX-compliance issue). Which is to say, they're
both portable, useable management tools, and so it isn't suprising that
people port them and use them to manage things. :)
--
Joel Baker <fenton@debian.org> ,''`.
Debian GNU NetBSD/i386 porter : :' :
`. `'
`-
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