On Fri, 6 May 2005 00:09:58 -0500 Brian Harring <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: | That said, I'll just point at fink's nonstandard prefix for | installation as a better example that it *can* be pulled off without | all of this 'fire, brimstome, and the apocalypse on earth' cruft | people keep throwing about as an arguement it can't work. | | Think about it for a second. What is the purpose of --prefix, and all | the other lovely configure installation options? To configure the | source so it'll work in it's intended destination. | | Yes, it doesn't work perfectly across all packages, and not all | packages are designed to be flexible in installation (straight | makefile hacks come to mind, dev-util/bsdiff for example). This is | why I keep pointing at the parallel of adding a new arch. You get | your core support down, and expand support across the tree as you go. | | In other words, yes, there are technical issues, but I _still_ posit | that those issues are experienced by those who want said support, and | who are the lucky buggers who have to do the bug squashing. It's the | same damn thing macos encounters, and any new arch, hence my complete | lack of understanding for why people are quick to fire off "piss off, | it won't work" without looking at the actual issues.
The problem isn't the packages. The problem is the ebuilds. | > Eh? No, see, we have KEYWORDS, which indicate whether you can use a | > package on a given arch. | | Dodging my point. You stated, "if we introduce it, people will expect | it to actually work". It's defeatist logic; won't try because people | might bitch if they wade into experimental territory and get bit. | | That's the point I was getting at, which you seemed to ignore/not | understand. | | Pointing out that people might try an experimental feature and hit | issues and bitch as a reason for _not_ doing something is just plain | daft. Except we have an easy way of marking which ebuilds will actually work with this thing. Why not use it? It's a hell of a lot cleaner, it gives us better feedback and it makes it easier for the users. | If you've got a better suggestion, macos probably would love to know | of it ;) Per-ebuild whitelisting, kind of like KEYWORDS. This has the added advantage of making it easy for additional kinds of install target to be added at some point. | So, fink demonstration of --prefix hackery? If you want a better example, try either SGI or Sun's GNU tools ports. But they don't use ebuilds either. -- Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Vim, Shell tools, Fluxbox, Cron) Mail : ciaranm at gentoo.org Web : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm
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