On Wed, Aug 17, 2005 at 10:35:47PM -0000, Andreas Hauser wrote: > hmp wrote @ Thu, 18 Aug 2005 02:28:19 +0100: > > > >>Can we not use ports or pkgsrc as our build part of the problem, and > > >>produce packages that are understandable by APT* ? > > I am not at all convinced that some other backend solves the problem. > But making ports/pkgsrc produce other binary pkg types would be cool.
For pkgsrc there is some support to convert packages into rpm or Solaris style packages. But I agree that switching the backend doesn't solve anything. dpkg doesn't offer much the current pkg_* don't provide, the few things are more related to being able to handle cases like libc updates. > > Source level upgrades have always created some form of problem for me and > > it seems a lot of other people as well. Definitely not something that is > > viable or trust-worthy. > > No it's something you do on a special build host until you produce a quality > of packages you are satisfied with. Then you distribute those packages > to your other hosts. That is certainly power i am not willing to give up. chroot and jail makes this easier, but again, I agree with you. It's the same thing all Linux distros do BTW. > It doubt there will be 10000 "perfectly working binary" packages. The question of whether you can keep a snapshot of 10,000 packages resonable current depends ultimately on the resouces you have to build. It is possible, but autoconf tries hard to make more expensive. Joerg