RE: Alive?

[Brent Fulgham <bfulgham@xpsystems.com>]

> 	By only gripe about the ports suite came into the glare
> 	when I upgraded from FreeBSD 2.2.8 to v3.2 recently.  
> 	There a bunch of GNU things that I'd like to install.
> 	The gnome package(s), for one; and more to the point,
> 	gIDE.
> 
> 	The ports method screwed me up (or I screwd up myself,
> 	perhaps) by having some ports and libraries built the
> 	old a.out way, and the rest ELF.
> 
Did you choose to use a.out, or did they "come" that way?  

To answer your other question, Debian does have tools for
user-build of packages.  We do this for the Linux Kernel, so
a relative newby can just make some selections and off it
goes.  It's very helpful in terms of making sure you've
remembered the C compiler, the binutils, the C-preprocessor,
the linker, etc. ,etc., etc.  These things can trip people
up in the beginning.

If the BSD community was interested, it should be possible
to create a "native" dpkg that would identify Linux packages
and place them in /compat/linux/debian or similar, and 
recognize BSD "packages" (perhaps all source-only) and place
them in /src (or wherever BSD tends to place these things).

The creators of the BSD source "package" would then need to
place dependencies for the various tools and libraries needed
to build their program.

> 	I don't want to spent the hours|days figuring out all
> 	the dependencies and deleting each and rebuilding....
> 	....but that's about the only way.
> 
> 	At least a DebianBSD wouldn't have these problems.
> 
Yes -- that is a great benefit of DPKG.  In my experience, even
RedHat's RPM does not do as good of a job.  But a large part of
that is POLICY, and that's what counts.

-Brent