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Pkg 1.3.0 Released To Improve Package Management On FreeBSD

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  • Pkg 1.3.0 Released To Improve Package Management On FreeBSD

    Phoronix: Pkg 1.3.0 Released To Improve Package Management On FreeBSD

    After more than a half-year in development and working on tens of thousands of lines of code, Pkg 1.3.0 has been released by FreeBSD developers...

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  • #2
    I know pkg is for FreeBSD, but can this be used on Linux?

    Also is pkg a good package manager?

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    • #3
      As far as I know, FreeBSD should be much happy if it had itself such a nice package manager as "yum" or "apt"/"aptitude". I used to work a long time with FreeBSD and I loved it - still do - but it is rather a source based OS - probably one main reason why it's not used anymore as extensive as 12 years ago. In a production environment, there is no time to compile just everytime everything from scratch - just to get a kernel update, a security patch, a gcc update etc.

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      • #4
        Originally posted by uid313 View Post
        I know pkg is for FreeBSD, but can this be used on Linux?

        Also is pkg a good package manager?
        Well in the announcement it is stated that the code has been polished for easier portability. From my experience with it, pkg(8) is becoming a very good tool. I like its intuitive syntax, and the integration with App Cafe and Jails in PCBSD is phenomenal. Early on, the conflicts solving was a bit shaky but that should be now solved. Curious if the devs will be able to make it be able to update the system between minor and major version numbers aka 'freebsd-update' functionality.

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        • #5
          Originally posted by BSDude View Post
          Well in the announcement it is stated that the code has been polished for easier portability. From my experience with it, pkg(8) is becoming a very good tool. I like its intuitive syntax, and the integration with App Cafe and Jails in PCBSD is phenomenal. Early on, the conflicts solving was a bit shaky but that should be now solved. Curious if the devs will be able to make it be able to update the system between minor and major version numbers aka 'freebsd-update' functionality.
          I read somewhere that they were looking into that, but weren't certain how they were going to split up the packages yet.

          personally I'm kinda excited to see where PC-BSD is going to go, because my feeling is that in about a year or so they'll have smoothed out the rough edges and developed enough of a feature base that they'll finally be able to give linux distros a run for their money.

          edit: here it is http://blogs.freebsdish.org/portmgr/...d-packages-wg/
          Last edited by Luke_Wolf; 24 July 2014, 12:23 PM.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by phoronix View Post
            After more than a half-year in development and working on tens of thousands of lines of code, Pkg 1.3.0 has been released by FreeBSD developers
            Having seen this sort of thing going on in Commerical UNIX days, I find this re-inventing of the wheel rather depressing in the FLOSS world. Fedora have recently done similar re-developing Yum creating DNF, which basically seems to attempt to provide the features openSUSE's zypper/libzypp/libsolv provided since about 2008.

            I can't believe porting a package manager from Linux like libzypp is harder than rolling your own and using different package formats. But I guess it is a licensing preference .. BSD means you don't have to make the source code available. Then of course there's Debian apt and whole load of other different formats.

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            • #7
              Originally posted by rob11311 View Post
              Having seen this sort of thing going on in Commerical UNIX days, I find this re-inventing of the wheel rather depressing in the FLOSS world. Fedora have recently done similar re-developing Yum creating DNF, which basically seems to attempt to provide the features openSUSE's zypper/libzypp/libsolv provided since about 2008.

              I can't believe porting a package manager from Linux like libzypp is harder than rolling your own and using different package formats. But I guess it is a licensing preference .. BSD means you don't have to make the source code available. Then of course there's Debian apt and whole load of other different formats.
              Well, in Red Hat's case they wanted to modernize their package management while not breaking interfaces for their enterprise clients, so they're just sharing libsolv. I'm fully in favour of Red Hat switching over to zypper instead of dnf but I'm not exactly one of their enterprise customers.

              In FreeBSD's case they can't use zypper because it's GPL 2.0 and therefore in breach of their design goal of a completely permissively licensed base OS, and so they're not going to add more copy-left licensed software in replacement of permissively licensed ones. As a result I really can't begrudge the existence of pkg, plus at least Dragonfly BSD has already adopted it and it's available as an alternative option on NetBSD, so it's possible that Net and Open BSD will decide to use it as their default too in the future and as a result become the universal BSD package manager.

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              • #8
                Originally posted by uid313 View Post
                I know pkg is for FreeBSD, but can this be used on Linux?

                Also is pkg a good package manager?
                When I used FreeBSD on servers, it was as good as debian, which is MUCH better than RPM(almost eventually ended up with nearly unbreakable dependency cycles.

                The nifty thing about this is that it'll try to automagically pull local source deps from repos whereas in the past I've almost always been left with overlooked deps which don't appear until build dies, look up dep, install, try again. Even something that only kinda sorta halfway kinda sorta mostly worked would be awesome for some projects...

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