Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2006 12:33:22 -0700 From: Doug Barton <dougb@FreeBSD.org> To: Dejan Lesjak <dejan.lesjak@ijs.si> Cc: ports@freebsd.org, Maxim Sobolev <sobomax@freebsd.org>, freebsd-x11@freebsd.org Subject: Re: RFC: Merging X11BASE to LOCALBASE Message-ID: <44B7F182.8080009@FreeBSD.org> In-Reply-To: <200607141300.43547.dejan.lesjak@ijs.si> References: <200607130024.18047.dejan.lesjak@ijs.si> <44B740A5.6050709@FreeBSD.org> <200607141300.43547.dejan.lesjak@ijs.si>
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Dejan Lesjak wrote:
> On Friday 14 July 2006 08:58, Maxim Sobolev wrote:
>> What's the gain?
>
> I believe I mentioned some of gains in first mail. There is also the benefit
> of less divergence to upstreams as ./configure scripts of various ports
> use /usr/local as default prefix, but more importantly as modular X.org is
> becoming more widespread there is tendency of various packagers (for example
> Linux distributions already mentioned) to install all packages under same
> prefix. We expect that if we follow that trend, we would make maintainers and
> users' lives a bit easier in the long run.
Note, I am still making up my mind about whether what you're proposing is a
good idea or not, so I'm not intending this as a criticism. However, the
argument you propose above as a benefit for the move is completely specious.
Our ports are supposed to be prefix-clean no matter what the defaults in the
distributed software are, and no matter what prefix the user chooses. Thus
(other than ports which are broken now which need fixing anyway), the only
thing this move will do is ADD work for maintainers (at least in the short
run), it will not make anyone's life easier in this area.
I would also like to reinforce Maxim's point here, since I think it's
getting lost in the shuffle. The burden to the users is NOT just
reinstalling, which with modern tools like portmaster or portupgrade should
be pretty painless, if not time consuming. There is also the burden to our
users of editing config files, firefox app preferences, etc. etc. Some of
these can be handled automatically by the ports, many of them cannot.
Frankly, I'm still waiting to hear some really good reasons to make this
change, but my mind is still open.
Doug
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