Pkgsrc Is Cool (2022)

It is. Probably an even greater gift to earth from the NetBSD community than NetBSD itself. The ability to run recent packages on most arch without them forcing you to use NetBSD, but allowing you to keep the original OS in many cases if you want, is mind-blowing.

> Half the time I delete the program I was testing out anyway, but then I’m stuck with this extra stuff in my base system.

"apt autoremove", no?

> I never really even stopped to think that there might be way to separate out the “base system” from the other crap I’ve installed along the way.

That's the Windows-way, not the UNIX-way. /s

> Even better, pkgsrc lets you use it in unprivileged mode and install stuff locally in your user’s home directory like ~/pkg. This can give your user their own separate custom userland from other users.

A nascent form of containerization (but without, you know, all of the actual isolation). Also, I am fairly certain e.g. dpkg can do this too.

> Pkgsrc isn’t really a package repository itself. It is simply a collection of Makefiles that define how to build each package as well as the dependencies needed for a package. Each package’s Makefile defines where to download the source code for the package, how to apply any necessary patches, and then how to build it.

Ah, and now the ugly parts. How much value is all of this anyway, compared to fetching the tarball from the project's site and running make on your own? I guess the "patches to apply" is the most valuable part of all of this.

> One potentially “irrational” requirement of mine was that I wanted to be able to install software from my own network in case the internet ever goes down. Not just my internet, but THE internet. And I know that the internet as whole will probably never really go down, but I do think it may get to the point where the internet is fragmented into completely different silos because of government censorship.

I'm fairly certain it already has happened in a couple of places, and it doesn't looks like the trajectory is gonna change.