From: | Craig Dooley <cd5697@xxxxxxxxxx> |
Date: | Thu, 30 Oct 2003 16:04:42 -0500 |
Debian does have a system like this called provides. For example, exim, sendmail, qmail, etc provide mta, then if any program needs to send mail it can just depend on mta -Craig On Thursday 30 October 2003 16:01, Chris Pressey wrote: > On Thu, 30 Oct 2003 18:33:51 +0100 > > Emiel Kollof <coolvibe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > [...] > > As far as I care, the current BSD packages are fine as they are as > > packages, but the managing of those packages (/var/db/pkg, > > portupgrade, etc etc) needs to be overhauled. > > FWIW I agree. Advances in this area are probably going to come in small > steps anyway - might as well work with what was inherited, to start. > > Rambling along those lines: > I'm tempted to suggest re-thinking the use of 'make' in port-building. > I suspect the actual strengths of make are being underused. Isn't it > a bit ironic that most port makefiles look like shell scripts while the > job of *detecting stale dependencies* is done by a Ruby script? :) > > There's also an interesting little issue that occurred to me a while > ago, and I'm not sure there's any packaging system available which > addresses it (although please do enlighten me if anyone happens to know > of one - I'm not terribly well-read on apt, dpkg, etc.) The issue is > that the dependency tree for a package or port is usually, but not > always, static. The case for when it is static is well-understood and > usually handled well. The case for when it can vary, OTOH, is not. > > Example: say you have a graphical text editor built upon Motif (e.g. > nedit.) You can build and run it with either OpenMotif or LessTif. If > you already have LessTif installed, and the package declares OpenMotif > as a dependency - nothing good can come of it! Yes, you can put > USE_LESSTIF (or whatever it is) in make.conf to try to address the > problem, but a proliferation of package-specific switches just > complicates the whole process IMHO. It would be slightly better to have > a single port called, say, 'Motifalike', that builds either OpenMotif or > LessTif depending on your preference, and have every Motif-dependant > port specify Motifalike in its dependencies. Even slightly better than > that might be to specify Motif not as a package, but as an 'interface' > to which any number of packages might conform. > > Probably more of an annoyance than an actual problem for most people, > but I thought it might be an interesting 'hmm'-point for anyone who's > thinking about the packaging system. > > -Chris -- Craig Dooley cd5697@xxxxxxxxxx
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