there is no way to impose order on repositories

[avg-I]

The ability to order repositories is probably not required by anything in pkg design. But this feature nevertheless could be useful for performance and administrative reasons as well as working around bugs.
Right now the remote repository databases are attached in pkgdb_open_multirepos using pkg_repos for iteration, where pkg_repos is essentially HASH_NEXT, so it does not provide any meaningful inherent order.

On the other hand, sql_on_all_attached_db uses "PRAGMA database_list;" to get list of attached databases. The pragma lists databases in the same order as they were attached.

So basically the order of attachment is propagated to order of subsequent multirepository queries.

It would be nice if the repositories were effectively sorted by some meaningful property like their name or order within a configuration file or anything else that is controllable by a user.

[bapt]

This order in the one they are would in configuration files, for example /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/01.conf will be read before /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/02.conf

the same way the first entry in /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/01.conf will be read before the others etc.

[avg-I]

I respectfully disagree.
Could you please explain how the order you described is enforced in the context of the functions that I mentioned -- pkgdb_open_multirepos and sql_on_all_attached_db ?

[mwisnicki]

Ordering by file/repository name does not seem to work. On fresh install of FreeBSD-10.0 there is one repository: /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf (pointing to /latest/). Since this repo is usually in half-broken state (many packages missing) I've tried supplementing it with /quarterly/ and /release/0/.

Unfortunately, no matter which names are used the order always matches that of ls -f /etc/pkg (i.e. unsorted). So to control order one has to move all files away from /etc/pkg and move them back in desired order.

[mwisnicki]

Another thing I've noticed: contrary to pkg-repository(5), search order does not match that of pkg -vv.

I have 3 repos in this order: latest, quarterly, release. pkg install obconf proposes to install from release despite the fact that both latest and quarterly contain same version of obconf and it's important to pick latest since it could've been built with newer dependencies.

[andrejzverev]

does it still issue? We now have priority for repository as mention in pkg.conf(5)

[bapt]

fixed