Re: source-based package management

[Claudio Fontana]

--- "Alfred M. Szmidt" <address@hidden> wrote: 

> Fixing
> broken Makefile.am's
> that don't use DESTDIR is also a good task for
> someone who is is
> looking for something to do.

This is what I really feel as important,
and what I am trying to do since some time
(with a dramatic slowdown recently for my new
fulltime, time-sucking, but life-sustaining
proprietary software development work).

There are really a lot of possibilities that would
open up if, at least for GNU projects, build systems
really converge around the GNU standards. 

I offered help on -discuss to any GNU project to make
the move towards the standards, which lead to many 
very positive responses, fixes, and new build systems,
and also some negative responses [and probably even
more ignores].

Summarized, current state is that most GNU projects
support, at least,

./configure --prefix=PREFIX
make
make install 

and most also support DESTDIR.

When all above is supported, more or less small
shortcomings in the build system cause sometimes the
package to not really be --prefix-able, or to be
installable only as root, or to support DESTDIR only
partially, [...]

Read more here if interested:
http://www.gnu.org/software/sourceinstall/gnutest.html
[warning: not so recent]

This test could be of course automated and connected
to the release process, as it requires otherwise a
daunting amount of time to perform/maintain manually,
as I experienced first hand.
Many other 'management' tasks could be made much
simpler if we really prepare all our packages in a
standard way (something similar to sourceinstall, or
even simpler, could be used as a validation tool).

> Please help improve the Hurd, GNU Mach, and other
> missing and broken
> bits, this is far far more important.
> A system that
> crashes while
> compiling it self is not useful!

I have looked with new interest at the Hurd, and I
think there are great ideas there, and I find some of
the proposed ideas here on -system-discuss intriguing.
For example, getting rid of the PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH
and similar variables through removal of the need for
different prefixes is something I dubbed as crazy at
first, but now recognize as possible (with effort) and
desiderable.

I am currently not knowledgeable enough to be able to
really help in Hurd development, and the time at my
disposal for learning aggressively is shrinking day by
day. I would love to, but at the moment I have to
restrict my contributions to less daunting tasks.

Back to usual lurking I guess.

Claudio




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