From owner-freebsd-arch Sun Jul 14 15:58:49 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-arch@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.FreeBSD.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 145DE37B400; Sun, 14 Jul 2002 15:58:47 -0700 (PDT) Received: from mail.rpi.edu (mail.rpi.edu [128.113.22.40]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 6FE2143E3B; Sun, 14 Jul 2002 15:58:46 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from drosih@rpi.edu) Received: from [128.113.24.47] (gilead.netel.rpi.edu [128.113.24.47]) by mail.rpi.edu (8.12.1/8.12.1) with ESMTP id g6EMwifc180832; Sun, 14 Jul 2002 18:58:44 -0400 Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Sender: drosih@mail.rpi.edu Message-Id: In-Reply-To: <200207142156.g6ELu0E4080283@dotar.thuvia.org> References: <200207142156.g6ELu0E4080283@dotar.thuvia.org> Date: Sun, 14 Jul 2002 18:58:43 -0400 To: Mark Valentine , Doug Barton From: Garance A Drosihn Subject: Re: Package system flaws? Cc: arch@FreeBSD.ORG Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" ; format="flowed" X-Scanned-By: MIMEDefang 2.3 (www dot roaringpenguin dot com slash mimedefang) Sender: owner-freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG At 10:56 PM +0100 7/14/02, Mark Valentine wrote: >someone (Doug Barton ?) wrote: > > First, you can set PREFIX to be something else in your >> /etc/make.conf file, > >Doesn't work for packages, only ports. > >Hence my interest in the recent discussion of making install-time >relocation work. > I would like to see that too, but I think the problem is that many of the original programs do not understand that concept. The main idea of ports/packages is to take some program which already exists, then then automate the steps for compiling that on freebsd. The thing is, many programs (say, anything with autoconf) does understand the "install prefix" and maybe even things like an "exec prefix", but they do not understand "do a make-install to location-A, and then some other process will move files from there to location-B, so the programs installed in location-A have to be easily relocatable after the make-install". In some cases you can use a long path for the make-install PREFIX, and then just patch the object-files with shorter paths (padded with nulls) to relocate them, but in other cases you have to get into the original program and rework how it does things. With 7000 programs in ports, that extra work could get messy... [but I'd definitely like it if it could be done... I think that could be useful for both ports and packages, particularly in the step of getting the packing-list correctly when installing a port] -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message