Re: bind2netbsd [was Re: CVS commit: basesrc]

[woods%most.weird.com@localhost (Greg A. Woods)]

[ On , November 13, 1999 at 00:57:36 (-0500), Charles M. Hannum wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: bind2netbsd [was Re: CVS commit: basesrc]
>
> Elegant?  Distributing the source in a different form than *anyone*
> else does is elegant?  I thought we all learned what a bad idea that
> was from SRPMs...

Well, yes, there is a fine line between re-arranging everything and
simply fully importing the source into the existing tree....

I thought the idea behind the *2netbsd scripts was good in that it
encoded the process by which the package tree was re-mangled to fit into
the system tree, and to some extent it made it "harder" for integrators
to do anything too drastic.

Remember there are very different goals at play for people who are
trying to integrate a program into a single package than there
presumably are for people trying to build a coherent and consistent
system with a common layout and build system.  The latter folks
supposedly aren't trying to make it easy to extract the original source
either -- presumably they'd just point to the original separate
distribution if anyone's interested in seeing what it looked like.
However the former folks are probably targetting several different
platforms and may be trying to integrate several diverse sub-programs
and libraries into one build system and they too would likely arrange
things differently if they were dealing with one platform and were
integrating their code into a larger whole system.

I.e. it should not really matter that much if NetBSD's source tree
contains code from some other packages in a slightly different layout
than the package itself contains.

<tangent>
I'm not sure what you have against SRPMS directly, if that's what you
meant.  I do find that the authors often go far further at hacking
packages than they maybe need to, but in general I've found the concept
not that much different than pkgsrc (all of which I've seen several
times in the past too).
</tangent>

<soap-box>
I've never really liked any scheme that uses dist/* directories and
separated build dirctories, and I don't even really like the
pkgsrc/SRPM/etc. schemes of keeping original distributions separate from
patches, though at least the latter has a good reason for being done.
</soap-box>

-- 
                                                        Greg A. Woods

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