[PROPOSAL] Ports using SCM repositories as source instead of distfiles

Dmitry Marakasov amdmi3 at amdmi3.ru
Thu Dec 11 03:36:22 PST 2008


* Andrew W. Nosenko (andrew.w.nosenko at gmail.com) wrote:

> > I understand. But you're implying that there is Makefile and it supports
> > DESTDIR. As I understand, you're referring to autotools-based ports.
> > Remember, those are less than 1/4 of the collection.
> Excuse me, but he refers not to autotools-based ports, but to ports
> that follows GNU Coding Standards (section "Makefile Conventions" if
> more preciously).
> Autotools just brings such support out-of-the-box.
> And, IMO, projects that violates these things heavy, should be fixed upstream.
> BTW, from my expiriense, there are little amount of project that
> doesn't support DESTDIR of it's analog.  And many of them may be
> worked around anyway.
I didn't count or check thoroughfully, but the feeling I've got
from my 150+ ports is that no one actually supports it. I may be
wrong though.

And again, GNU Coding Standards don't cover build systems other
than make.  Also, it's not even a requirement: "So, we strongly
recommend GNU packages support DESTDIR, though it is not an absolute
requirement."

I agree with that you can't require all upstream maintainers to
support this feature. Architecturally this should be completely
package manager's problem (i.e. upstream should only provide
installation into PREFIX, and may optionally support DESTDIR, and
if package manager needs features like that staged install or
automatic plist generation, and upstream don't provide it, package
manager should take care of it by itself.

Tecnically, we may support DESTDIR in all ports. But considering
the amount of work required, and increased complexety of everything
as a result, I'd stick with static plists without hesitation.

See
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ports/2006-August/034745.html
those are some real examples of complexity and resulting confusion,
from first variant of DESTDIR support in ports. Now, when we have
one DESTDIR implementation, adding another will likely make some heads
explode, just think of variable naming.

I'll remind that what we are talking about is automatic plist generation,
and I think that this can be done without any hacks like installing a
port into intermediate directory before real installation just by
logging all writes to the filesystem. This will require no modifications
to the ports, very minor modifications to Mk, and will (in theory) work
without fail whatever the port will install, also ensuring there're no
runaway files (that is, files not listed in plist, or files not
installed into DESTDIR for some reason).

-- 
Dmitry Marakasov   .   55B5 0596 FF1E 8D84 5F56  9510 D35A 80DD F9D2 F77D
amdmi3 at amdmi3.ru  ..:  jabber: amdmi3 at jabber.ru    http://www.amdmi3.ru


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