Monday, May 29, 2017

Re: OpenBSD Package Manager

Mon, 29 May 2017 14:16:26 -0400 "H. Ishikawa" <hishi@protonmail.com>
> 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.

Hi hishi,

I disagree with your statements - pkg tools are easy, reliable & quick.

perlfaq - frequently asked questions about Perl
http://man.openbsd.org/perlfaq

OpenBSD::Intro - Introduction to the pkg tools internals
http://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD::Intro

pkg_add - install or update software packages
http://man.openbsd.org/pkg_add

1) Implementer gets to choose the tool, Perl is fast enough, confirmed.
2) This is one reliable approach, what others choose is not a template.
3) Because, tools evolve, please feel free to provide your improvement.

From an independent user perspective, your arguments are kind of weak..

Kind regards,
Anton Lazarov

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