Out of base, into dports – DragonFly BSD Digest

2014/10/152014/10/15 by Justin Sherrill

Out of base, into dports

John Marino updated wpa_supplicant (in dports). He then suggested moving it out of base into dports, so that it could be updated independently of the base system. (this update, for instance, took years.) Since wpa_supplicant is necessary to get some systems online – and it can’t be installed if missing if you don’t have a network link – it may be too risky. I think other packages could be moved out, myself.

6 Replies to “Out of base, into dports”

Rolinh says:

2014/10/15 at 22:27

Actually, no, John Marino did not update wpa_supplicant in base. However, he created a port with a more recent version of wpa_supplicant which can be set as default wpa_supplicant by adding wpa_supplicant_program=”/usr/local/sbin/wpa_supplicant” into rc.conf.
Justin Sherrill says:

2014/10/15 at 23:03

That explains why I couldn’t find the update commit. I corrected the story.
John says:

2014/10/17 at 11:01

Matt cited a case where somebody has an image but not an nrelease image which would come with the vital ports. I don’t know a real case where that could happen, so I am not really buying the “we *must* have wpa_supplicant in base” story.

It’s easy to say “if you want to put DF on a machine that doesn’t have a wired ethernet port, you must use a provided (nrelease) image”. That’s it. So the “worst case scenario” seems contrived to me.
Justin Sherrill says:

2014/10/17 at 11:29

I can imagine a situation where wpa_supplicant gets removed as part of working with packages – something gets scrambled, and /usr/local/ gets renamed. With dports, an unsuccessful upgrade is much less likely. That may not be enough to say yea or nay.

It may be worth building an image this way, with various packages added, to show it can work.
Anonymous says:

2014/10/17 at 17:43

I like this idea, Justin. Create a new version, sans wireless, to test the build in the manner John feels would be better, if it works out, we proceed in that direction, if not, we maintain status quo.
Justin Sherrill says:

2014/10/17 at 23:08

The last comment from Matt in the thread – or at least what I thought was the last comment, can’t find it right now, was “let’s try it with other not-as-essential packages and see how much it bloats the install image”. Worth doing, though I don’t know if I’ll find the time this weekend.

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