As I mentioned, the other night, was my first time logging in as root to a SmartOS instance on Joyent Public Cloud.

I immediately discovered a new package manager for me to learn, oh boy. I first used RPM in 1997. I’ve installed RPMs on AIX, used yum on Yellow Dog Linux (RDL) and much later Red Hat. On the Mac I’ve used fink, port, and most recently homebrew. There was even a time that I was very impressed by the myriad flags of ebuilds and portage — Gentoo, really was (is?) an incredible community with the best documentation.

Coming from RPM, dpkg + apt felt like magic, and it has stayed my safe place. At times I’ve been a power user, though I’ve never created or maintained my own packages except very briefly with YDL.

It felt like I had already tried them all, but here I am faced with pkgin.

# pkgin se git
[ A long list of results ordered reference ASCII. Why reversed! ]
# pkgin se git | wc -l
67
# pkgin se git | egrep "^git"
gitweb-1.8.3.1 Web interface for GIT repositories
gitso-0.6nb9 Gitso is to support others
gitolite-3.5.1 Gitolite allows you to host Git repositories easily and securely

In frustration, I googled, scmgit-base. Hence the title of this post. It’s going to take me some time to come to like pkgin.