From owner-freebsd-current Mon Dec 11 15:56:14 2000 From owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Mon Dec 11 15:56:12 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-current@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-65-26-235-186.mmcable.com [65.26.235.186]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 378C437B400 for ; Mon, 11 Dec 2000 15:56:12 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 39972 invoked by uid 100); 11 Dec 2000 23:56:11 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <14901.27035.233431.111206@guru.mired.org> Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2000 17:56:11 -0600 (CST) To: current@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: [current] Re: Confusing error messages from shell image activation In-Reply-To: <20001211112908.B39546@peorth.iteration.net> References: <14898.33404.356173.963351@guru.mired.org> <14898.31393.228926.763711@guru.mired.org> <200012100904.CAA27546@harmony.village.org> <3A336781.94E1646@newsguy.com> <14899.41809.754369.259894@guru.mired.org> <200012101557.KAA29588@khavrinen.lcs.mit.edu> <14899.43958.622675.847234@guru.mired.org> <20001210120840.C38697@vger.bsdhome.com> <14900.26674.605585.357915@trooper.velocet.net> <20001211112908.B39546@peorth.iteration.net> X-Mailer: VM 6.75 under 21.1 (patch 10) "Capitol Reef" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-current@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Michael C . Wu types: > I know I should not jump into this bikeshed. But IMHO, whereever > we have our packages install to, we should also place > our ports metadata (/var/db/pkg) and the ports skeleton in the > same place, preferably a mountpoint. This allow me to switch > between different sets of installation with ease. (No, please > do not tell me to change PREFIX and mv /usr/local /usr/local.bak) > With this setup, I can rm -rf , and > have a clean system again. For the ports developers, we can > switch between configurations without the need for chroots or > jails taking up disk space. Ok, I can see wanting that. And I can see how it would be handy for ports developers. But my instant reaction was "yuch". The reason for that is that, unlike the contents of ${PREFIX}, the contents of the ports metadata is *not* generally recreatable from the /usr/ports tree. This means it's more precious, and you might want to back it up more frequently, etc. While some method for ports developers to move the metadata (say an environment variable) should be provided, I think the above is a good reason for leaving the default as is. BTW, pkg_add (at least) honors the environment variable PKG_DBDIR to set the location of the ports metadata directory. Is there some reason you can't just set that to /usr/local/etc/db/pkg or some such? Final comment - I wish more ports developers *would* set PREFIX.