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Date: Wed, 21 Aug 1996 02:56:50 -0700 (PDT)
Message-Id: <199608210956.CAA07203@silvia.HIP.Berkeley.EDU>
To: jkh@time.cdrom.com
CC: marc@bowtie.nl, chuckr@glue.umd.edu, sysseh@devetir.qld.gov.au,
        ports@FreeBSD.org
In-reply-to: <3277.840558958@time.cdrom.com> (jkh@time.cdrom.com)
Subject: Re: PREFIX with X11 ports
From: asami@FreeBSD.org (Satoshi Asami)
Sender: owner-ports@FreeBSD.org
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 * I think this somewhat misses the point - moving everything out of
 * /usr/X11R6 is a lot of *work*, and I'd certainly imagine that Satoshi
 * has more than enough of that right now. :-)

Well, as Chuck said, I was the one that brought this up this time.
I'd *love* to be able to get the ports out of /usr/X11R6 so an upgrade 
of XFree86 can be done much less painfully (i.e., mv /usr/X11R6
/usr/X11R6.old, install new /usr/X11R6 and you can always switch back
to the old version if there's something wrong).  Also, as far as I'm
concerned, XFree86 is closer to the OS proper than ports, so I'd
rather not stomp inside /usr/X11R6 if we can avoid it.

 * Can we just leave this as it is and stop rocking the boat when we've
 * got plenty of other more important issues to deal with in the ports
 * collection (like finally implementing a distfile search path so that I
 * can include a CDROM's distfiles transparently in the user's search
 * path)?

I've thought about this before, I just can't seem to come up with a
good solution to the following problems:

(1) How do I "remember" where I found a particular distfile?  A single
    distfile is referenced several times (fetch, checksum, extract).
    We can't pass variables between different rules in bsd.port.mk,
    and besides, there can be any number of distfiles so we probably
    need to write it to a file (ugh) if we want to avoid searching the 
    entire path every time we need distfiles.

(2) How do I remember which component of the path is writable?  This
    one is slightly easier than the first problem, as we need to
    remember only one such path.  However, we still have a problem
    like "how to break out of a .for loop"....

After considering the problems and the (expected) complexity that it
will introduce in bsd.port.mk, I came to the conclusion that maybe
lndir'ing /cdrom/distfiles is not such a bad idea.... ;)

Satoshi