Re: This sucks

["Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH" <allbery ece cmu edu>]

On Monday, July 16, 2001 14:51:29 -0400, "William F. Maton" 
<wmaton ryouko dgim crc ca> wrote:
+-----
| On Mon, 16 Jul 2001, Matthias Warkus wrote:
| > Noah Roberts e-mails me. Film at 11. Reply right now, after the break.
| > > Third, something that would make life a lot easier for most of
| > > us.......everything that is REQUIRED to run gnome should be in a
| > > single package.
| >
| > Do you realise how big that package would be?
|
| I'd rather have a list instead.  I recall there was something like a
| dependencies HOWTO for GNOME on Solaris.  I don't know if it still exists.
+--->8

I'd like to see something similar to how the FreeBSD ports collection does 
it:  "cd /usr/ports/x11/gnome; make install clean" installs base GNOME and 
I can go in and build additional parts as I need/want them.  Then use 
portupgrade to upgrade things with all dependencies handled for me.

This could actually be done in a reasonably portable manner because of the 
relatively limited scope, assuming everything including prerequisites can 
be configured with either autoconf or xmkmf.  A port makefile for a package 
would only need to know the package's dependencies and where to get the 
package it wants to build; then run configure or xmkmf depending on 
existence of configure or Imakefile in the unpacked package, then run make 
in the package directory.  (Well, assuming xmkmf works correctly, which 
tends to be false on Solaris 7 and earlier.)  Unfortunately, portupgrade 
would be a bit more complicated, but I think something sane could be done 
there as well.

(There's a slight possibility that I'll look into doing this; it's not a 
perfect fit for ECE's build system, but then neither is GNOME itself --- 
and if set up right it might well be possible to make a generic framework 
which would also do something mostly sane for our environment.)

--
brandon s. allbery  [os/2][linux][solaris][freebsd]   allbery kf8nh apk net
system administrator   [JAPH][WAY too many hats]        allbery ece cmu edu
electrical and computer engineering                                   KF8NH
carnegie mellon university     [linux: proof of the million monkeys theory]