The ports-system and userland in general.

[Michael Neumann]

Magnus Eriksson wrote:
On Tue, 14 Dec 2004, Weapon of Mass Deduction wrote:


I'm currently thinking out a good userland
architecture, so I would like to know what
qualities he or others is/are especially looking
for then.


Seems I missed some of the discussion.  Anyway, here's my thoughts.
Mostly semi-random, but I've thought of some things before and this seems
like a good time to get them off my chest.  :-)
  My main experience is with pkgsrc, by the way.



  Please think of a system that does not depend on magic Makefiles.  Make
a specification that anyone can implement, be it with 'make install' like
command-line tools, graphical package selection or whatever.  Just leave
room for smart implementations you haven't thought of yet.
What do you mean with "anyone can implement"? That's some sort of 
non-executable text-file, a specification in XML or YAML?

I know of some Ruby-related package managers, which build a 
specification (from Ruby source), and this specification (it's in YAML) 
is then distributed and can be installed on other machines. So it 
contains the instructions on how to build and install (or install-only 
in the binary case) the package. For those who are interested and may 
get some input:

  http://rpa-base.rubyforge.org/
  http://rubygems.rubyforge.org/
Regards,

  Michael