On Sun, 2009-09-27 at 18:59 -0500, Bob Friesenhahn wrote: > On Mon, 28 Sep 2009, Robert Collins wrote: > > > > The landscape has changed though, and I suspect that if we gather stats > > about this we'll see that install-sh is dead weight for most packages > > nearly all of the time. > > Maybe the landscape has changed for you, but not necessarily for > everyone. Installing "coreutils" could be quite a burden and the > tools might conflict with the OS-provided equivalents.
I'm not a strong enough believer in the Copenhagen school to think that I'm in a different universe. I'll agree that the distribution of OSs is different for each open source project. But - data needed - for either of us to reason effectively on this. As far as conflicting, there are multiple well established places to install things that won't conflict: /opt /usr/local ~/local - plus you can just make one up and put it in your path. > > Its true that it is not a lot of dead weight, but at some point we > > should be raising the bar - ever so slightly - on what we bundle into > > the tarball. At one point we never required a Make implementation that > > does includes, now we do [for dependency tracking] - and sure we degrade > > well. > > The make implementation that does includes is only for developers of > the package. It is not necessary to have a fancy make to build the > software. It is if you want dependency tracking [and yes, one time builds shouldn't need that, unless they ship with an unsettled graph]. As a fraction, amongst your users, who do all of the following: - build their own binaries - do so with /no/ modifications to the code - on a platform with no suitable install program Thats the key number - the amount of benefit that install-sh gives you. > > All I'm suggesting is that the time has come to let folk on the small > > proportion of machines without a sufficiently useful install, build it - > > exactly as they have to build any other dependency they are lacking. > > What other dependency might they be lacking? My own package is quite > large but all of the dependencies are optional. Lets start at the ridiculous and propose that they are missing a C compiler. -Rob
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