[csw-maintainers] Want to test an alternative to pkg-get?

[Peter Bonivart]

This is really weird, I just got this mail and I see that you sent it
September 23rd, according to the headers it's been sitting on an
opencsw mail server until today. Maybe your gmail account wasn't
allowed to post to the list and it has been stuck waiting for
approval. I use gmail too but I've set it up to send as my opencsw
account. When I forget to change my from address the same thing
happens.

On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 10:57 AM, Gary Law <gary.law at gmail.com> wrote:
> (*) the pkgtool installer wants my /opt to be root:bin, not root:sys

Version 1.1 has a trimmed prototype that doesn't include /etc/opt,
/opt and /var/opt to minimize risk of modifying the attributes of
already existing directories.

> (*) there's no mention of the configuration file in the man page. How do I
> set which mirrors to use? ibiblio seems to be the default mirror which is
> hard coded into the tool, and the pkgtool.conf file is referenced by the
> code too, but it's format is undocumented. AFAIK ibiblio is mirroring
> packages off of Blastwave Inc., not opencsw.

I'll look into improving the man page. Please look at
http://wiki.opencsw.org/pkgutil for more info, also in 1.1 the
conf-file is better documented.

I think the mirror issue has finally been settled, ibiblio as an
example has chosen to mirror blastwave as blastwave and opencsw as
opencsw, the old csw path has been removed. The path should be correct
in 1.1.

> (*) My gut feel, completely untested, is this is faster than pkg-get.

I have done some simple tests and it's usually faster than pkg-get but
some may think pkg-get is faster because it gets busy right away
downloading and extracting packages so it can find dependencies.
Pkgutil may seem slower at the beginning when it's presenting new,
updated and current packages but to me that info is really valuable.

I haven't optimized the algorithms either yet so there may be better
speed in the future. Right now I'm mostly working on features.

> (*) how is the gpg signing turned on/off?

It should be off by default, you have to turn it on by setting that
option (use_gpg=true) in pkgutil.conf. If pkgutil doesn't find gpg
support it will tell you which package you need to install.

> (*) Functionally, works perfectly during my limited tesing.

Excellent!

> (*) Love the "I'm going to do this now" option.

You mean the --nomod option? I've used it a lot during testing. :-)

-- 
/peter