using pkgsrc and the NetBSD ports collection, anyone?

Folks, something not reflected in the release notes for the
recent ARK "release" was some meddling with the "pkgsrc"
stuff out of the NetBSD project, which I did a few months
ago.  It is basically about building NetBSD packages on
non-NetBSD systems.

Background: the Arusha Project (notably: Sidai team) has a
rolled-our-own multi-platform package manager, but this
isn't ideal (and wasn't my initial idea).  It would be
better to use one or more Real Package Managers [TM] to do
the heavy lifting, and let ARK be the "meta package
manager".  This is a great idea until you actually try to
find a multi-platform package manager.  (I looked at RPM and
NetBSD pkgsrc pretty hard back in 1999 or so.)

Times change.  The NetBSD pkgsrc thing is much advanced, and
other choices have emerged: OpenPKG, for example.

It really should be possible to build an Arusha system with
one of these as the major package-handling substrate.  I do
not have a compelling reason to do so myself, but perhaps
one of you is interested (and I'll help :-).

Here's how far I got with NetBSD pkgsrc (remnants of this
effort are in the verilab2 team files).  Set up bits of disk
in the right places, then grab and build the bootstrap
package; I did...

    ark package install pkgsrc-bootstrap--20030225

My idea was then to keep all of this stuff *in its own
little world* and definitely *out of my systems areas*
(/etc, /usr, ...).  That's the bit I didn't really figure
out.  You have to do weird things like install the
'xpkgwedge' package, which makes all the X stuff get put
somewhere other than '/usr/X11'.

Anyway, then for each chunk of NetBSD-packageness that you
want, you make a little ARK-package "wrapper", something
like...

    <package name="dia-pkgsrc" xml-version="1">
    <status>revealed</status>
    <prototypes>
      <prototype team="."     name="pkgsrc"/>
      <prototype team="sidai" name="pkgsrc"/>
      <prototype team="." 	  name="ALL"/>
    </prototypes>

    <pkgsrc-tool-location> graphics/dia </pkgsrc-tool-location>
    </package>

The pkgsrc world can then be used to do *everything*
required (including dependencies) to achieve the equivalent
of 'ark package install ...'.

I was going to use the Sidai machinery for the final steps
of making the package available on each host ('deploying'
and 'revealing' in ARK-speak).  You could do something
different, of course.

Someone slightly familiar with the NetBSD pkgsrc system
could probably get this going without much difficulty.  I
lack the combination of knowledge and motivation myself, but
will be happy to help :-)

Will


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