Daemon's Advocate article

[Robert Garrett]

David Cuthbert wrote:
Matthew Dillon wrote:

    Hey, here's an idea... using the VFS wrapper idea our     'ports' 
system could create a namespace that makes everything
    appear to be preinstalled.


Interesting experiment, but I think too much would break in reality.

There are a lot of autoconf scripts that, for example, check permissions 
and usability of include files and libraries as well as xxxx-config 
shell scripts.  Quite often, I don't *want* some of these obscure/broken 
libraries linked in.

The only way I can think of for this to be practical would be to install
precompiled trusted packages. I can't ascertain that a port will in fact 
build.

Robert Garrett