Re: [gentoo-osx] The road ahead?

[Kito]

On Oct 31, 2005, at 4:17 PM, dirk.schoenberger@×××××××××.de wrote:

> Just wanted to put my 2cent into the discussion.
> I suppose I am currently just a pure Gentoo-OSX user, and while I
> see the
> point of the prefix project, I am not really convinced by it. I
> like the
> way Gentoo integrates into the system, or at least the part
> accessible by
> a console.

Wow. You are in the minority in this I think.

A big part of the challenge in designing the beast, is it has to be  
compatible with non-prefixed installs, and eventually even a non- 
prefixed install on the same machine,... this is by no means a fork,  
so portage installing packages to / is obviously not going to go away.

>
> I see this as an advantage above e.g. Fink, with its own namespace.
> The
> namespace variant implies that I have to fudge around with PATH
> variables
> and other CLI stuff, in order to get the apps working. I still have no
> real MacOSX integration, with App folder and GUI starter elements
> (which
> would be my biggest feature request)

The Portage take on this would be slightly different, as it will live  
in its own space, with its own set of GUI accessible .apps,  
Frameworks, etc. Can you elaborate on "I have to fudge around with  
PATH variables and other CLI stuff" and "real MacOSX integration,  
with App folder and GUI starter elements" please?

>
> From what I see as a user, the Gentoo packages divide into 4
> categories
>
> 1) packages which integrate nicely into the system (no
> dependencies, or
> dependencies which are properly provided by MacOS)

The problems with this have been outlined numerous times by both  
users and devs, but to quickly re-hash them: It makes system backups/ 
reinstalls a pain, the deps that are 'properly' provided by apple can  
and will change without notice, it requires manual mapping of faux- 
deps via the profiles, a software update or `diskutil  
repairPermissions /` can render your portage installed files useless,  
its what keeps the project a laughable novelty to most Darwin/OS X  
users and developers

> 2) packages which clash with MacOS provided packages, things like
> python
> or automake spring to mind
> 3) packages which depend on 2)
> 4) misc packages which are otherwise problematic. This means most
> of the
> package.masked packages, where I cannot really speak about.
>
> The biggest problem is obiously the packages in 2)
>
> My private idea in order to emerge packages in 3) would currently
> be to
> manually install the needed packages in places like /usr/local
> (instead of
> Gentoos /usr) and put these packages into package.provided. It
> would be
> really nice if I could use this way while still being able to use the
> emerge functionaltiy. Perhaps this could be handled by a special
> USE flag?

A USE flag for what exactly? I'm not sure I understand you. You can  
manually install things to /usr/local and add them to  
package.provided right now if you want to. Either way, lying to  
portage about whats installed on a system is a bad idea, and always  
leads to trouble. Portage package dependencies are just that,  
dependencies on other packages in portage. So when an ebuilds has a  
DEPEND="app-shells/bash", that means it wants/needs the bash in  
portage, not a bash someone has done a ./configure && make && make  
install on.

--Kito

P.S. Its good to see you are a human, I was starting to think you  
were a clever bugzilla bot someone wrote to keep us busy ;)


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