Re: Alive?

[Gary Kline <kline@tao.thought.org>]

According to Brent Fulgham:
> > 	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?  

	Priot to FreeBSD 3.0, everything was a.out.  So
	everything that was pre-installed came that way.
	Finally, finally, last fall, FBSD went ELF.  

	Rebuilding isn't rocket-science; it just takes time.
	Well, everything takes time, :-)


> 
> 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.


	Super.  
> 
> 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.
> 

	This is exclusively my opinion, but I would rather 
	integrate whatever we can...  If the BSD side would
	rather have, say,

	/compat/debian/src/bin
	/compat/debian/src/usr.sbin
	/compat/debian/src/usr.bin
	/compat/debian/src/usr/local/bin

	for the actual source code, that's fine with me.  I honestly
	don't care that much where the sources or binaries are; and
	I think it would be a waste of time to argue about the
	pathnames, &c.

	As for having the source code or not, the reason I want it
	is because I'm a hacker; people who aren't probably could 
	not care less... .




> > 	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.
> 

	That's a roger!

	gary


> 
> 
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-- 
   Gary D. Kline         kline@tao.thought.org          Public service Unix