Thanks for the succinct information, Greg. I stick to pkgin primarily, and intend to keep it that way; it's a nice tidy road towards where you want to get. NetBSD is just right and too a nice road, like a natural evolution of BSD4.4, reading that install guide by Mr McKusick, Mr Bostic et al. Wonderful, historical OS but not too ancient!
Thanks again. Simurgh On Mon, 17 Sep 2018, 17:44 Greg Troxel, <[email protected]> wrote: > > Daddy Cool <[email protected]> writes: > > > What is the effective, if any, difference between: > > 'pkg_add i3' (example) and > > 'pkgin up; pkgin in i3' ? > > pkg_add and pkgin have different configs for where packages come from. > But I'll assume you have them pointing to the same place. > > pkgin as a database of what's installed. You can do things like "pkgin > sk" and "pkgin -n ar". to get info from it. pkg_add intalls the > package, while pkgin installs the package and keeps pkgin's database in > sync. > > While it seems that pkgin will self-update its database, I would > recommend that if you are using pkgin on a system, that you try to > always use it, vs bare pkg_add. But I have not observed any real > trouble from mixing. > > > I get that pkgin is analogous to penguinista 'apt' or 'yum' -- but so is > > too pkg_add, as opposed to pkgsrc's ./configure, acceptable_licence, > > pkg_vulnerabilties, Stop. and friends. > > pkg_add is less than apt/yum, in that it will add a package (and > dependencies), but doesn't have the "show keep", "autoremove", "upgrade > all" functionality. > > > Therefore, is either pkg_add or pkgin in the -preferred- or -recommended- > > way to go about things, all being equal? Or it doesn't matter either way? > > The NetBSD tradition, following ancient UNIX traditions, is that there > are multiple tools and you are free to choose. I would say that if > pkgin works (because there is a binary package set available with a > summary file), then it's probably better to just use pkgin. Or, you can > only use the base tools and never use pkgin. >
