[geeks] freebsd and package tools

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Mar 12, 2009, at 05:21 , Michael-John Turner wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 07:49:22PM -0400, Shannon Hendrix wrote:
>> More importantly though, some of the package stuff runs under sudo,  
>> which
>> restricts the env vars.
>
> You'll probably need to modify env_keep in your sudoers(5) to retain  
> the
> values in those environment variables.
>
>> We have a custom FreeBSD tree, so that's doable.
>
> Building a custom pkg_add should be pretty easy - changing  
> releases[] so
> that your release's directory is "packages-7-stable" should do it.

Actually, that would make it fetch the latest 7.x packages, which  
would break our system.  It seems that -stable contains the latest  
packages.

This is an embedded system we ship to customers, and going to the  
latest packages would likely fail because some of them no doubt depend  
on things newer than our 7.0-pre system.

That's the one caveat of FreeBSD ports: at some point they become  
dependent on features of newer FreeBSD releases, and it is not  
remotely clear when that happens, you just find out the hard way.

For example, we need Qt 4.4.x because of a daemon that a programmer  
wrote in C++ and Qt, but our base OS only supports Qt 4.3.x.

I tried using a newer ports tree, but it wanted to upgrade a ton of  
stable and tested things, and it wanted some things in the base system  
we don't have.

FreeBSD ports are great when you are maintaining an individual system,  
but I'm finding them not quite so good for use with an embedded project.

-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com