Re: Avoiding software duplication

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

> Most major Linux distributions include Python in the base installation.
> The EL family, for example, depends on it, since YUM is written in it.

And, I often hear people having problems because the included version is
too old.  This hasn't happened for a few years, but until crazily
recently people wanted python packages to keep 2.4 support because some
very old LTS of CentOS (or something like that) had 2.4.  Usually the
suggestion for them is to use pkgsrc :-)

But, you have a good point about using what's usable.

> OpenSSL is pretty much everywhere, too. There are other examples for
> sure.

Many things in pkgsrc have a "builtin.mk" file that controls whether the
base system version is used or the package version when a bl3 is
included.   Some of these are acutally in mk/ instead.

openssl in particular, has this treatment.  Currently, I see it's
installed on a -7 system, and not on -8.  So the logic in pkgsrc must
say that the verison that comes with 7 is not good enough.

> For such software, can we avoid using the pkgsrc versions, and use those
> provided by the distribution?

Yes, this is already the way it is in general.  But there are two things
that might not be as you would like:

  often pkgsrc declares that we need a version with recent features, and
  we build the pkgsrc one on platforms where the included version is
  maybe ok, maybe not, depending on which package wants it.

  some things don't have this kind of support


I have never heard of our python packages being able to use the base
system version.  The rest of pkgsrc expects the python build to be just
as pkgsrc builds it, and trying to use the base one seems likely to be
difficult.  But, if you want to experiment and locally add builtin
support and see how it goes, that would be interesting.   I will say
that for python, I expect you to run into a lot of issues which are
nontrivial to resolve.