packaging system (was: Re: GCC 3.3.2 kernel)

[Craig Dooley]

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 at 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 at xxxxxxxxxx
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