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Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

Cool. I've seen that in the past, but didn't think of it for this situation. Reading the docs for pkgsrc on Solaris does not give me a high level of confidence it'll work on current Solaris systems (it covers Solaris 10 and mentions stuff that I know does not apply to current Solaris).

But, I might actually want to try it on Mac OS X. I've been working on making our installer work on Mac OS X with Mac Ports, but that's been pretty rough (though mostly not due to Mac Ports problems...Mac OS X is simply not an acceptable substitute for UNIX or Linux and the documentation for server-oriented stuff is either non-existent or woefully out of date).

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pkgsrc is our primary package manager for SmartOS, our illumos distribution. We also provide binary packages for OS X and Linux:

http://pkgsrc.joyent.com/

pkgsrc should still work on Solaris 10, and there are a few people in the community continuing to provide patches for it, but obviously a lot of us have moved onto illumos so the support and documentation isn't going to be as good. That said, the aim of pkgsrc is to support every system possible, so we will always welcome contributions.

"pkgsrc should still work on Solaris 10"

I guess I wasn't clear...I need it for current Solaris 11.x. Which the pkgsrc docs don't seem to match.

But, I'll have a look at it. pkgsrc does seem promising, and something I've looked into in the past (particularly for systems that have poor package management).

Do people use MacPorts any more? Everyone I know migrated to Homebrew long ago.

I wrote about this, after spending a few days looking into Homebrew. Homebrew is not just a bad package manager, it is a dangerous package manager. No one should be using it on a server, ever. Server use is all I care about.

http://inthebox.webmin.com/homebrew-package-installation-for...

Also, there was some discussion here about the Linux port of Homebrew (which is also a terrible idea):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9346464

I would love to just have one package manager for all these systems. If the adoption of pkgsrc takes off, I'll be very happy to delete my brew install. Every time it updates, I wonder if its such a great idea ..

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