[csw-users] SunFreeware vs. Blastwave

[Peter Bonivart]

On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 6:47 PM, Larry Siden
<lsiden at westside-consulting.com> wrote:
> I just installed a new Sun workstation running Solaris 5.10.  Being new to
> Solaris, I wound up installing both pkg-get and pkgutil.  I'd like to use
> one or the other exclusively to avoid potential conflicts, but each seems to
> cover different packages from the mirror sites they are defaulted with.
> For example, the mirror http://download.blastwave.org/csw/unstable has git
> 1.6.3, while the SunFreeware mirror ftp://ftp.sunfreeware.com/pub/freeware
> has Git 1.7.4.  The mirror http://download.blastwave.org/csw/stable doesn't
> even contain git!
> OTOH, the blastwave mirror has many PHP modules, while the SunFreeware
> mirror site has only different versions of php and no php-cli.
> Also, AFIKT only Blastwave has gpg signed packages.
>
> Why does each have such different coverage?  Are they targeted at different
> use cases (for example webservers vs something else)?
> Can I mix and match packages from each without creating conflicts?

First, note that you have written to the OpenCSW mailing list but
you're asking about Sunfreeware and Blastwave. Have you looked at
www.opencsw.org?

I think you can use pkg-get with Sunfreeware but you can't use pkgutil
since Sunfreeware publishes an old format of the catalog.

You can mix packages between Sunfreeware and Blastwave/OpenCSW but NOT
between Blastwave and OpenCSW since both install files in /opt/csw.
You have to choose which one to go with and select mirrors from each
project.

I would recommend taking a look at this page to look at OpenCSW's
packages: http://www.opencsw.org/get-it/packages/

You can also make a comparison between all three here:
http://buildfarm.opencsw.org/competition/competition.html. I'm not
100% sure this page is open but if you can load it look also at the
bottom of it for a summary.

My recommendation would be use OpenCSW exclusively. Also pkgutil over
pkg-get since I happen to be the author of pkgutil. :)

/peter