I sometimes have to use remote systems that I don’t have root access to. I often find that I need to install packages in my home directory, so either I build from source or copy over my own pre-compiled versions.
Recently I’ve found out about pkgsrc. I’m looking for opinions from anyone who has used it to install packages without root access. Any feedback is useful!
@TwinTurbo why not choose Nix or Guix ?
I don’t have experice with either of those. Are they suitable for the use case in my post?
What packages in particular? I have seen people use https://asdf-vm.com/ for what you are asking for installing tools like kubectl/helm/terraform in their home dir as a user.
My current work uses pkgsrc and it seems more designed for making firmware images. We are trying to get off of pkgsrc as it has us locked into running rhel 7 currently.
Shell tools, mostly. For example: ripgrep, nnn, or newer versions or vim or tmux.
Does pkgsrc need RHEL 7? If so, I wouldn’t be able to use it.
It doesn’t need rhel 7, our issue is that we compiled it on rhel 7 and then built apps that link against that compiled version, and since it has hard links to packages at rhel 7 versions. So we are a bit stuck on rhel 7 until we get off of it completely.
