Re: The project

[Steve Price <sprice@hiwaay.net>]

On Wed, 21 Jul 1999, Hamish Moffatt wrote:

# On Tue, Jul 20, 1999 at 08:04:49AM -0500, Steve Price wrote:
# > Same goes for FreeBSD.  Many ports have knobs but we only ship
# > a package for them with a single set.  You want different ones,
# > we either create multple ports (a2ps-${PAPER_SIZE}) or you grab
# > the port's sources and tweak them yourself.  We did try once to
# 
# Actually we have a nice hack on Debian called libpaper, which allows
# us to specify the system default paper size in a file called /etc/papersize.
# Most programs respect that. eg I hacked another text to postscript
# converter called atp to use it.

I usually change it by setting PAPERSIZE to some value in
/etc/make.conf, but that only works while building packages.
You can change it on the fly though.  That's snifty. :)

# > fixup the package building process in bsd.port.mk to allow a
# > single port to build multiple packages and it turned out to be
# > a huge nightmare that didn't gain us much at all that having
# > multiple ports didn't make a ton easier.
# 
# We do have multiple .deb files built from a single source package. This
# is most often used with libraries -- you get one .deb containing
# the library itself, and another containing the files needed for
# development -- mostly the include files, libtool .la file etc.

What I was talking about was an effort to create multiple
packages during an automatic package build of the entire
Ports Collection.  So in port's Makefile we'd have something
like:

	definition of KNOBS
		FOO with values of x, y, z
		BAR with values of a, b, c

And during the package build we'd do something like this:

	foreach port
		foreach combination of every knob
			build a package

So we'd end up with 9 ports (in this case) all automagically
generated with 0 human intervention. The concept was neat but a
royal pain in the arse to get right, so it was ditched. :)

Is that what you were talking about or something different?

-steve