From owner-freebsd-libh Thu Mar 29 15:21:45 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-libh@freebsd.org Received: from winston.osd.bsdi.com (winston.osd.bsdi.com [204.216.27.229]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2457137B71A for ; Thu, 29 Mar 2001 15:21:43 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from jkh@osd.bsdi.com) Received: from localhost (jkh@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by winston.osd.bsdi.com (8.11.3/8.11.2) with ESMTP id f2TNKug84474; Thu, 29 Mar 2001 15:20:57 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from jkh@osd.bsdi.com) To: brooks@one-eyed-alien.net Cc: chrisc@vmunix.com, kris@obsecurity.org, libh@FreeBSD.ORG, op-tech@openpackages.org Subject: Re: PackageNG and OpenPackages In-Reply-To: <20010329144334.A9413@Odin.AC.HMC.Edu> References: <20010329142742L.jkh@osd.bsdi.com> <20010329144334.A9413@Odin.AC.HMC.Edu> X-Mailer: Mew version 1.94.1 on Emacs 20.7 / Mule 4.0 (HANANOEN) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <20010329152056I.jkh@osd.bsdi.com> Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2001 15:20:56 -0800 From: Jordan Hubbard X-Dispatcher: imput version 20000228(IM140) Lines: 37 Sender: owner-freebsd-libh@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Yes, I agree with all of this. This is also why I feel that any work which goes into establishing *taxonomy* will never be wasted. Let's say that someone put some serious effort (and I think that'd be merited BTW) into establishing what a merged /usr/ports and /usr/src might look like. Just for purposes of argument, let's say it also ended up looking like this: METADATA.xml archivers devel japanese palm astro java print russian audio editors korean science benchmarks emulators lang security biology french mail shells cad ftp math system chinese games mbone sysutils comms german misc ukrainian converters graphics net vietnamese databases hebrew news www deskutils irc packages x11 Not that it would, of course, since this is rather too flat of a hierarchy and I'm sure someone could do better with even 10 minutes thought (I just yanked in an `ls -C /usr/ports/[a-z]* and added "system" :-) Into each of these directories could go all the metadata which describes the contents at that level of the tree. Ultimately you get to the leaf nodes and those contain the metadata necessary for describing that package - where its source lives, how to build and install it, its dependencies, whether the sources can go away again after its built and installed, etc. etc. All of this kind of information is ultimately pretty package-agnostic and I can easily see a tree from which I could say "make packages FORMAT=deb" or "make packages FORMAT=bsd" with equal ease, not to mention building the "operating system bits" themselves. If one choses and represents the metadata correctly, it's always a superset of the information needed by any particular target package format. - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-libh" in the body of the message