Re: @dirrm behaviour change (was: CVS commit: pkgsrc/pkgtools/pkg_install/files)

[Marc Espie <espie%nerim.net@localhost>]

On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 01:25:02PM +0200, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 11:04:18AM +0200, Marc Espie wrote:
> > When we did this in OpenBSD, we didn't even add a new keyword. We simply
> > decided that
> > file
> > was a file
> > and
> > dir/
> > was a dir.

> I'm still not decided whether it should be allowed to include
> directories in the PLIST, but there is one important part to keep in
> mind. Directories with @pkgdir are shared, they don't create conflicts.
> This is quite different from normal files and therefore they should be
> explicitly distinguished.

How is this different from normal files ? pkg_add needs to have explicit
code to handle it, but this is an internal detail, in principle, it's just 
how people expect directories to behave.

In my opinion, the distinction is just pkg tools's internals, there's no
need to explain to people what's going on.

What we did in OpenBSD was simply to let dir/ be shared, put them in the
right location in the packing-lists, and be done with it.
It was about five years ago, and it's one piece of the pkgtools we never
had to revisit in all that time.

No-one even raised an eyebrow.  As long as your shared objects are efficient
enough (we have a high-speed version of the PLIST reader that reads only
shared items), it's trivial.  Anything more complicated is error-prone for
the package's maintainers (again, my opinion).