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

[Johnny Lam]

Christopher JS Vance wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 01, 2005 at 08:37:25AM -0800, Brooks Davis wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> 
> OpenBSD seems to succeed, and can be told to use systrace to enforce
> that things get staged right.  Of course, they have far fewer ports
> than FreeBSD.

Staging requires more effort on the part of the port maintainer to check 
that all of those caveats that Brooks listed aren't tripped over.  I 
think FreeBSD Ports has been really successful because it *doesn't* 
impose a lot of effort on the part of the port maintainer, and losing 
this property is a bad thing.

	Cheers,

	-- Johnny Lam <jlam at NetBSD.org>