A bit of discussion: Why don't we use a stage?

[Brooks Davis]

On Tue, Feb 01, 2005 at 01:26:59AM +0100, Danny Pansters wrote:
> Building a bit upon the mythtv maintainer who had a problem with deinstall, I 
> never understood why we don't first build and install into a stage and then 
> install into the live system from that (like Gentoo Linux does and I think to 
> great benifit in terms of subimitters). It's much easier to make maximum use 
> of that particular software's possibilities before comitting it to the live 
> file system, as you can intervene right there on the staged install. Upon 
> install we also often treat ${WRKDIR}/<theport> as being the stage as it is.
> 
> I wonder, are there pressing reasons not to do that (apart from marginally 
> more space needed)? Perhaps this is a stupid or bikeshed question but I've 
> wondered about this several times. Do I imagine a bigger gain than there 
> would be in reality?

I use staging areas for many of my ports, but not all.  I find them very
useful for ports that are mostly just bunches of files, for instance PHP
web applications.  It's non-trivial to do this for all applications
though.  Many applications really want to be be installed where you told
them they would be when you built them and they have hard coded paths
which prevent doing something else.  This is certainly fixable, but I
seriously doubt it's worth the effort in many cases.

There are also a number of applications that go to great lengths to
avoid tying themselves down to the detriment of their usability.  For
instance, the globus port installs in /usr/local/globus by default, but
you can copy that directory anywhere and still have it work,
unfortunately, it means you have to set environmental variables before
anything include services meant to run out of inetd work.

-- Brooks

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