At 11:47 AM 3/20/97 -0500, Rob Deker wrote:
>On Thu, 20 Mar 1997, Curt Sampson wrote:
>
[good argument for /usr/contrib/* removed]
>> 
>I don't know. I personally don't like monolithic packages. It makes life fo
>those with limited disk space nasty. If I want to get a copy of something like
>top, and all I want is top, I dont' want to have to rm hundreds of megs of
>other cruft to get it....

Well, have the package be a tarball, with a "special" first file.

The first file could be a table of contents, listing the packages included
in the tarball, and a list of all of the files needed by each individual
program. (perhaps the output of "install" w/ logging).

This way the person who makes the tarball can just build the programs and
install them. Then take the log, run it through cut+paste+friends and pass
that back to tar. Bam! The distribution tarball has just been built.

This would be easy, and would allow the person installing the distribution
to decided what exactly they want to install (via some sort of menu).

Hmmm....If a package depends on another package being installed first, that
fact can be recorded in the special file as well.

CC line trimmed.
--
XCOMM Kevin P. Neal, Junior, Comp. Sci.     -   House of Retrocomputing
XCOMM  mailto:kpneal@pobox.com              -   http://www.pobox.com/~kpn/
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