Date: Mon, 20 Nov 1995 13:05:27 +0000 () From: Michael Smith <msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au> To: asami@cs.berkeley.edu (Satoshi Asami) Cc: msmith@atrad.adelaide.edu.au, ports@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Proposal 3: Non-executable file in *_DEPEND Message-ID: <199511201305.NAA19646@genesis.atrad.adelaide.edu.au> In-Reply-To: <199511201243.EAA00811@silvia.HIP.Berkeley.EDU> from "Satoshi Asami" at Nov 20, 95 04:43:30 am
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Satoshi Asami stands accused of saying:
>
> * Pardon my ignorance, but is there a PKG_DEPENDS, to list packages that the
> * current item depends on?
>
> No, the package names of dependencies are not in the ports Makefiles.
> Only the paths (e.g., ${PORTSDIR}/lang/tcl) are there, and your lovely
> make will cd into that directory to do "make package-name" to retreive
> the package name from that Makefile.
Can we have one then? 8) On the basis of :
for item in PKG_DEPENDS
if item not installed and package available
install package, continue
if item not installed and port available
install port, continue
complain
Seriously, I understand that this is hardly going to happen overnight; I'm
just looking to stir up a bit of discussion as the whole prepackaged thing
is the current bee in my bonnet 8)
> This is a neat idea, but the problem is that this would require a
> major change in the paradigm (see above). Also, I'm not exactly sure
> how manageable this will be, as we have ports depended from all over
> the place, checking for package dependencies when a new version comes
> out can be pretty hard.
The baseline idea is to come up with a scheme which is simpler. I'm
not sure if this is necessarily the right way however.
My thinking is prompted by the recent questions wrt. the new fvwm port -
I'm fairly sure that it would have compiled fine against any recent
version of xpm, but because the xpm version was bumped in the interim,
some confusion ensued.
> Right now, we have a sort of collapsed scheme that makes this all very
> simple. It's also probably too anal, but I'm afraid to fix it would
> complicate the (already complex) picture too much.
Sometime when I have a keyboard I can actually find the keys on, I'll try
to put some coherent thoughts together. I spent a little time recently
looking at how the RedHat Linux people do things. They're a little more
rigid in their pacakge definition rules, but the "rpm" tools looked
fairly similar in feature set to the pkg_* tools, so I tinkered with
their graphical front end with a vague idea to making it work under FreeBSD.
They have some interesting ideas, but their code is pretty awful.
> * And as well, a PACKAGE_USES entry to indicate other packages that aren't
> * required, but _are_ used (for extra features, etc).
>
> This has been suggested a few times, but I still can't understand what
> we can do with this. If pkg_add is not going to pull it in
> automatically (like RUN_DEPENDS, etc.), the most we can do is to put a
> printf that will print out a message -- then how is this different
> from just putting in an "@exec echo" line in the pkg/PLIST?
Because a hypothetical interactive installer will pop up a dialog and say
"The package you have installed can also make use of the following packages
to provide extra functionality. Check each of the additional packages that
you wish to install and click OK"
or
"The package you are about to remove is used by the following packages.
These packages may fail or produce unexpected results if this package is
removed. Check each package you also wish to remove and click OK, or
click Cancel to keep everything."
It would also be nice if _everything_ was listed in the PLIST file,
rather than the current shorthand of listing only directories which contain
files specific to the package. This breaks with things like Tcl/Tk, where
you may modify or add things to a directory, and then when you pgk_delete/
pkg_add to upgrade, you lose your changes.
Unless things have changed recently, pkg_delete doesn't use rm -rf either,
so packages with specified directories containing subdirectories don't
get cleaned out.
It's also necessary in order to provide a mechanism for verifying the
installation of a package, and determining whether the components of a
package have changed since they were installed.
If anyone's really keen, they could start thinking about pkg/ICON too 8)
> Satoshi
--
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