Monday, May 29, 2017

OpenBSD Package Manager

Hello, I'd like to ask some specific areas of the pkg_add tools.

1. Why Perl instead of C?
Perl is comparatively slow, and I think this limits who can contribute
to the source code. How many developers in OpenBSD are actively doing
any review of the pkg_add tools code? Would there be any interest in
porting pkgsrc or pkgng from another BSD, or rewriting it in C?

2. Why no package database file?
Other package managers like apt-get can fetch a single file that has
all the package versions/info in it. When I update my packages on
OpenBSD Current, it is a very slow process. Each package must be
individually checked for updates, rather than comparing a list of
what I have to a single list of the newest versions. This makes
doing updates very painful and I avoid doing it sometimes.

3. Why so many connections?
When I tried to investigate why the update was so slow, I saw that
pkg_add was making one HTTPS connection per package! Tools like
wget from Linux can reuse a single connection for many downloads.
Could this be added to pkg_add in OpenBSD?

Thank you.

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