FreeBSD Port: hal-0.5.8.20070104

[Ulrich Spoerlein]

Juergen Dankoweit wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> first of all thanks for the great job you are doing for the FreeBSD
> community.
> 
> While installing the Gnome2 package for FreeBSD 6.2 the user
> "haldaemon" (UID = 560) and the group "haldaemon" (GID = 560) is not
> created. It costed me hours to find out what was going wrong. After
> reading "+INSTALL" I found out the the UID/GID has to be created. Now
> hald runs perfect and it is a great thing especially for my sister who
> now uses FreeBSD too :-)

That's the big problem with having two ways that (should) accomplish the
same thing. 'make install' a port and 'pkg_add' a port. However, it is
sheer luck if those two things to the same thing.

Two things could be made to enforce better packages:
1. Change the install/packages sequence to 'build package install'
  (OpenBSD does this, AFAIK). This needs a lot of work but would be an
  ideal solution, IMHO.
2. Provide better tools to maintainers, to test their packages in a
  "clean" environment. Unionfs could help a lot here, especially for the
  integration in pointyhat. The output/difference of pkg_add/make
  install then needs to be analyzed (similar to 'nothing' vs 'make
  install deinstall', which is already checked on pointyhat).


I have no idea how to accomplish 1), and have some ideas about 2), but
implementing those is hindered by non-working unionfs on 6.x

Ulrich Spoerlein
-- 
A: Yes.
>Q: Are you sure?
> >A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation.
> >>Q: Why is top posting frowned upon?