[ On Monday, February 21, 2000 at 22:18:32 (+1030), Berndt Josef Wulf wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: fix for databases/rrdtool
>
> I've since received patches for rrdtool-1.0.10 from Jeff Rizzo
> and welcome Chris' suggestion of changing /usr/pkg to ${PREFIX}.

Yes, definitely a good idea!  ;-)

> What I
> don't like is the idea to rollback rrdtool to use the libraries
> supplied with the package. I rather like to see the author of
> rrdtool to modify the autoconf utilities to check whether a required
> library already exists on the system and if not than use the the libs
> supplied. Frankly, I don't believe this will happen. 

There's an extremely major problem with packages that use autoconf's
ability to detect installed dependent packages at compile time:  They
are inherently incompatible with the concept of supplying binary
packages and you would have to explicitly either undo or force any such
checks in the pkgsrc module anyway.  I.e. the pkgsrc module must know
exactly what dependencies are going to be in place in the resulting
product independent of the build environment and as such it must either
explicitly depend on all possible external modules *or* explicitly undo
those checks for external modules for which a dependency is not
desirable (and thus in this case revert to the internally supplied
version).

The author's decision to include explicitly tested versions of the
dependent libraries in his distribution is the best compromise and it
should most definitely be honoured by NetBSD's pkgsrc module.

If you really do want to upgrade the version of any given library then
the correct approach in this case would be to patch the new version into
the package (using the pkgsrc patch mechanism) and continue to build it
with the internal library.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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