Re: [gentoo-osx] Re: sys-apps/findutils (GNU)

[Finn Thain]

On Tue, 8 Nov 2005, Lina Pezzella wrote:

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> >My opinion actually was to just let it be ~ppc-macos, since there are
> >no known problems with the OS provided find and xargs.  When we have a
> >prefix, we can just install the normal GNU find and xargs (without g
> >prefix) and have maximum compatibility with the other arches on that
> >point.
>
> Agreed 100%.

Doesn't that mean that new code that comes to depend on the gfind and 
gxargs usage will also have to be changed at that later date? If you avoid 
this policy now, you avoid that problem later. No-one has yet come up with 
an inadequacy of BSD xargs and find, so why do it? Just for the sake of a 
misguided policy?

But, it seems to me that there is a good compromise, along the lines of 
Diego's eselect proposal (similar to Debian's /etc/alternatives). We could 
use eselect or similar to maintain a "symlink farm" of g-prefixed symlinks 
to the GNU binaries. A baselayout revision could safely permit a 
Gentoo-wide policy whereby such gfoo binaries could be called from any 
boot script, tool script etc. In this way, you can avoid having to special 
case the distro in ebuilds and scripts, and you can avoid pulling in 
redundant deps on systems that ship the same binaries without g-prefixes. 
On those systems, the vendor package could just be "eselected" to create 
the symlinks, and indeed the baselayout for such systems could ship with 
the symlinks already in place.

That is the only way I can see for compatibility both with the variety of 
Darwin distros, and with the variety of Gentoo OS's.

-f

> - --Lina Pezzella
> Gentoo Developer
>
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