Other package management systems do one or two of the following things, but I haven't found any that can do all three at once, other than pkgsrc:<p>1) have good availability of pre-built binary packages for most platforms<p>2) facilitate building of packages directly from source, whether on non-mainstream platforms / architectures, and / or with or for the purpose of non-default package options<p>3) unprivileged builds / installations, packages rooted anywhere in filesystem, completely self-contained dependencies<p>Having to use more than one package management system because one or the other doesn't do one of these things can be a real pain, and can make maintenance rather difficult.
I've been using pkgsrc to package our firm's stuff for Mac OS X clients, it works a charm.<p><a href="https://www.anserinae.net/setting-up-a-pkgsrc-repository.html#setting-up-a-pkgsrc-repository" rel="nofollow">https://www.anserinae.net/setting-up-a-pkgsrc-repository.htm...</a><p>Currently working on using it to distribute the same software to Linux. Will be great when it gets there, but we aren't quite ready yet.
Very interesting, I didn't know pkgsrc could be used on Linux, I'll check it out. In general the only things keeping me from BSD are non free apps like Zoom so the next best thing is to BSDify my systems.
I'd been wondering how good pgksrc is on macOS for a little while, previously having used Homebrew wherever Nixpkgs was inconvenient or incomplete. Could pkgsrc could be a better choice?<p>pkgsrc is relatively nice for a cross-platform, source-based package manager in the old style, in that it provides convenient binary caches for most use cases.<p>I wonder: Has the writer of the post in the OP tried any next-gen source-based package managers, where the kind of isolation he describes as desirable between system and user packages is guaranteed between all packages altogether?
I really like pkgsrc. I'm not really qualified to give a technical justification for it. It just had the right simple, clean feel to it, which NetBSD in general has. I would even go so far as to say that it was fun to use.<p>I consequently once spent quite some time trying to get it working under Cygwin so I could use it at work, but never got past problems with Cygwin group names that have spaces in them. It was too complex for me to fix....
No mention of DragonflyBSD? They used pkgsrc as their main package manager for 10 years, portable or not, it still required quite a bit of maintenance. Seems like it was too much in the end, second-class citizen rights are not great.
it was a big help in Solaris to VWware migrations I did circa 2008-2012. I had one bash script that would install the whole site on either, bootstrapping almost everything from pkgsrc.
I wonder if anyone is going to create a linux distribution with a base system baked in with pkgsrc managing the applications. It would be very useful for containers and WSL.
I used it with Netbsd 1 and it was the first thing to install in Solaris.<p>Other question: how does one handle detection whether upgrades exist?
Something like renovatebot but using pkgsrc.
Or what is the best way in 2021 to trigger fresh builds against the latest packages?