Re: Cygwin package management

["Jeremy C. Reed" <reed at reedmedia dot net>]

On Tue, 28 Dec 2004, Donovan Baarda wrote:

> > I'd like to suggest that you all look at www.pkgsrc.org. It is a
> > cross-platform packaging system. I am trying to get it to work under
> > Cygwin (and it already works under Interix and maybe other Unix flavours).
>
> Why use pkgsrc instead of dpkg, which already has a cygwin package? What
> does pkgsrc have that dpkg doesn't? Is whatever benefits it has enough to
> outweigh the smaller user/support base?

You answer part of your questions in the next paragraph ...

> BTW, is anyone actually using dpkg in cygwin for anything? I can't see a
> cygwin apt, and without cygwin ported debs in an apt repository, I can't see
> it being much use...

dpkg is a package management tool. Pkgsrc is more than just package
management tools -- it also provides portable build scripts for installing
software on a wide variety of Unix systems.

I have spent a lot of time studying Debian package (and other "Linux"
package) diffs (used to create packages). In most cases, they are very
Linux specific. Pkgsrc focuses on making sure that the diffs are portable
to work on many Unix systems. (We also try to submit back the portability
patches back to the original developers/maintainers.)

Porting existing Debian (or other) packages to Cygwin can take a lot of
work. Porting pkgsrc build framework should be a lot less (although I have
ported pkgsrc before, under cygwin it has been more work for me).

Pkgsrc also provides symlink-based package installs as an option so you
can have same software package with different versions installed multiple
times.

It has many other nice features, such as dependency keyword-based rc.d
scripts, customizable config file locations, common packages over many
platforms, stable branch updated quarterly (and security fixes updated as
frequently as needed) to make it easier for "stable" upgrades, package
vulnerability database, ...

 Jeremy C. Reed

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