[ On Fri, December 18, 1998 at 16:54:34 (-0800), Curt Sampson wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Package Paths Proposal v2
>
> On Thu, 17 Dec 1998, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> >
> > The design of the pkg system should take
> > into account that packages eventually *should* be fixed.
> 
> No. This is simply not going to happen. There are way too many
> sources out there, and it is A Much Better Thing to use sources as
> they stand rather than adding a lot of modifications to them that
> won't go back into the vendors' versions. You don't want to end up
> spending a collosal amount of developer time dealing with this.

But it can, and possibly will, happen that packages will not require
hard-coded paths, and indeed many packages already work this way.  I'd
bet at least a beverage of your choice (not that you'd be likely to
successfully survey everyone sufficiently to collect! ;-) that at least
51% of the authors/maintainers of all remaining packages would like to
have their packages modified to not require hard-coded paths and will
accept back any necessary changes and make them permanent.  As for the
other 49%, well they can either be patched with pkgsrc (as almost always
happens already), or they can be tagged as unfriendly, etc.

The point is that the pkg system should not be designed around errant
and correctable behaviour of *some* packages.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
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