Re: New FreeBSD package system (a.k.a. Daemon Package System (dps))

On Fri, May 11, 2007 at 10:35:41AM -0400, Mike Meyer wrote:
In <20070511051852.GA89359@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Kris Kennaway <kris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> typed:
There are a few ways you can go. The simplest is to install a
complete i386 world in e.g. /compat/ia32 and have i386 packages
installed there, and change the kernel to do a "magic directory
lookup" for i386 binaries that does path munging like the linuxulator
does with /compat/linux.

Actually, the simplest is to install a virtual machine and just use
that. But none of these is quite ideal.

If you want the i386 packages to live in /usr/local alongside the
amd64 packages, you'll need to do something like adding an @arch
directive to the +CONTENTS file recorded in /var/db/pkg, and add some
checking to pkg_add to ensure that when you install a package,
everything it depends on was built for the same architecture.

Which is pretty much what I pointed out in my original request. Except
you don't really need everything it depends on to be built for the
same architecture. If your port needs gmake to build, or uses
ghostscript to do ps->jpeg conversion or some such, it won't really
care what architecture the executables were built for - just that they
run. It would help if requirements were flagged with whether or not
they required the same architecture.

You have to be more careful than this, because a lot of ports have
architecture-dependent on-disk formats for their data files (obviously
not the jpeg example, but there are lots of other cases that use a
non-portable storage format). In practise avoiding all these
conflicts will be very restrictive: as soon as you have installed a
moderate number of amd64 packages, you lose the ability to install
most i386 packages because of these header/library/data file conflicts
(e.g. you can't install an i386 gtk app if you are running a gnome
desktop). Which means you're back to installing the i386 packages in
a separate prefix, i.e. option 1.

You'd need to also add these checks to bsd.port.mk so it exits
gracefully when someone tries to natively compile a port for which
non-native dependencies are installed (e.g. it's going to be really
unhappy if it finds i386 headers or libraries). This method might be
more trouble than it's worth.

Again, it might or might not be unhappy. But now you're venturing into
ports as opposed to the package system. I have a whole other list of
things to consider there.

The point is that the real problem is: "how do you arrange the bits on
disk", not "how do you wrap that in a package system". Until you
figure out a workable on-disk arrangement for the files, questions
about packaging are not relevant. And it seems that option 1 is the
only workable one in practise (unless you have some other idea), which
can easily be achieved today with a couple of hours of kernel hacking.

Kris
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