Re: The project
On Mon, 19 Jul 1999, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
# On Mon, Jul 19, 1999 at 03:04:30PM +0200, Per Lundberg wrote:
#
# > Yeah, that's one thing. The fact that the base system doesn't consist of
# > packages is also a really annoying thing. Simply put, it's too much like
# > Slackware and too little like Debian for my taste.
#
# That's an excellent point -- I'd forgotten about that. How are upgrades of
# the base system handled? From memory the installer has a special upgrade
# option. That's a bit ugly -- like you point out, Debian handles the base
# system just like everything else.
I believe this was by design. I'd definitely like to see a more
modular base system but just for grins I'll play devil's advocate
for a minute. :) NOTE: these are statements from some purists
that don't necessarily reflect my own opinions entirely.
Let's say we have a distribution with characteristics something
like this.
- 2 kernel versions
- 2 C/C++ compilers (gcc-2.8.*, egcs)
- 2 object formats (a.out, ELF)
- several hundred other userland programs which could have more than
one (incompatible) version
Ignoring the last one for a moment which will make for a huge
number of combinations that must be tested, we have 6 different
distributions that we have to rigorously test. This is the
number one reason why the "base" distribution is not PNP-able.
The manpower requirements to do all the testing is way beyond
our means.
This is not as fictitious a scenario as one would think, since this
could easily be FreeBSD or Linux if you s/object formats/libc/.
FreeBSD is a base distribution of tools that we know play well
with each other. The ports collections has tools you can plug
and play, but we cannot guarantee that you won't see any problems
if you replace parts of the base with them, because we haven't
tested them. That doesn't mean that you can't, just that we
probably never tried so we're not making you any guarantees. :)
# I find the whole packages-in-/usr/local thing a bit odd, but I suspect
# that FreeBSD doesn't subscribe to the FHS so it's probably just a difference
# of opinion.
You can install a port with 'make install' or pkg_add anywhere
you want by setting the environment variable, PREFIX, to the
relative location of where you want the files to go. In fact,
I do this all the time with PREFIX=/opt because I have a set
I use for everyday stuff and (the default /usr/local) is where
everything goes while I'm building packages for new (unknown)
ports. Satoshi does his builds in a chroot'd environment so
he doesn't need to worry aobut this, but I don't have the HD
space to do this yet.
BTW, what does FHS mean? Something like 'man 7 hier' on a
BSD box?
-steve
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