Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2001 12:51:49 -0700 From: Jordan Hubbard <jkh@osd.bsdi.com> To: alex@big.endian.de Cc: richy@apple.com, libh@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: packagetool.tcl Message-ID: <20010619125149O.jkh@osd.bsdi.com> In-Reply-To: <20010619191557.B667@zerogravity.kawo2.rwth-aachen.d> References: <20010615171239.B935@zerogravity.kawo2.rwth-aachen.d> <20010619115903.F65489@bohr.physics.purdue.edu> <20010619191557.B667@zerogravity.kawo2.rwth-aachen.d>
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From: Alexander Langer <alex@big.endian.de> Subject: Re: packagetool.tcl Date: Tue, 19 Jun 2001 19:15:57 +0200 > libh's package library completely uses TCL for everything. > OpenPackages wants its own packaging format, so we have to support > OpenPackages format in libh's libs. Well, I think that may be jumping to conclusions a bit. I've personally *always* seen OpenPackages and libh as parallel efforts and have said so many times in the past. OpenPackages, more power to 'em, has been attempting to consolidate the prototype stuff I started in 1994 and has since grown to become a defacto *BSD packaging standard. There are a number of divergent edits to the make(1) based ports collection and the C-based pkg_install suite which they're trying to pull back together and from the standpoint of making the *current* bits easier to deal with, I think it's a fine thing. libh, on the other hand, is something which grew out of an entirely different design spec which I and several other people at Walnut Creek CDROM put together as an appropriate "second generation" effort. It made no attempt to be backwards compatible and there was every expectation, had the contractor funds held up, to simply bring it in as a completely new, paradigm-shifting replacement which would live alongside the old stuff until such time as that completely died out. I don't think you should saddle libh with the OpenPackages format since that format is very much the legacy of a lot of half-baked thoughts on what constitutes a reasonable packaging system and if I had it to do over, I'd do it very very differently. That's essentially libh's mandate and I think that this is also a hallmark of all really good software projects. Given enough time and resources, companies typically start over and re-write from scratch any successful system so that it truly DOES represent a significant evolutionary step over what came before. Try to keep simply hacking the same code base and it inevitably leads to something like Windows 98. There's room for both projects to proceed in parallel and I don't see any reason to "mate" them. - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-libh" in the body of the message
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