Re: ultimate goal of DESTDIR support?

["Johnny C. Lam" <jlam%pkgsrc.org@localhost>]

Malcolm Herbert wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 09, 2008 at 11:42:51PM +0100, Klaus Heinz wrote:
> |Late in 2006 Joerg Sonnenberger added support for installation to a
> |directory DESTDIR: copy files as non-root user to temporary directory
> |DESTDIR, create binary package from those files and use pkg_add to add
> |the package to the live system.
> |
> |Although I do not remember seeing this explicitly said anywhere, I
> |always had the impression that the intent of DESTDIR support was to get
> |away from the current (traditional) method, ie some day in the future
> |pkgsrc would use DESTDIR installations by default.
> |
> |Is this impression correct? Or is "DESTDIR" installation just a
> |nice-to-have feature and takes second place in importance to the
> |traditional method?
>
> Personally I'd love to be able to create a package in a seperate area
> and not be required to install in order to package it ... that would
> make upgrading much much cleaner - you could then decide to commit to
> replacing packages iff the packages were built properly instead of
> winding up with a broken system half-way through if it failed.

Unless I'm misunderstanding -- or underestimating -- the DESTDIR 
installation method, it currently does not solve the problem you 
describe because pkgsrc still requires any dependencies used during the 
build to be installed into your ${LOCALBASE}.  This means that, for 
example, that you cannot build an entirely new set of Courier-MTA 
packages without uninstalling some of the current ones.

If you really need to do that, you should already be using either 
pkgsrc/mk/bulk/mksandbox or pkgsrc/pkgtools/pkg_comp to do all of your 
builds within a chroot, and in that case, it doesn't really matter 
whether or not you're installing to a DESTDIR or installing directly 
into "/usr/pkg" within the chroot.

        Cheers,

        -- Johnny C. Lam