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

[Finn Thain]

On Thu, 10 Nov 2005, Grobian wrote:

> > > 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.
> >
> > Assuming I understand your point correctly (which is debatable), that
> > is an awfully complicated solution whose primary aim seems to ensure
> > that you don't confuse /some/prefix/bin/someutil with
> > /usr/bin/someutil by turning one into a symlink to the other.  If you
> > need to figure out which util is called by default in your shell
> > session, try using 'which'.  If you need to _ensure_ that you use OS X
> > utils while in a shell, a simpler solution would be to not put the
> > gentoo directories in $PATH in the first place.
>
> eselect is a nice idea, but only useful for the user.  Portage will
> always prefer to use it's 'own' tools, IMHO.

Yes, eselect is not really neede. I don't expect the user to need to move 
symlinks around too often.

> If a user wants to use OSX/xargs instead of GNU/xargs, that user should
> fiddle with his/her path, don't source the Gentoo prefix script or place
> a symlink to OSX/xargs in his/her ~/bin (and make that one come first in
> the path).

The g-prefixed symlinks aren't there for the users' benefit, they create a 
uniform environment for gentoo scripts and ebuilds regardless of distro.

>
> > > 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.
> >
> > Why would Gentoo need to stay compatible with "Darwin distros"?  OS X
> > isn't going anywhere if you install Gentoo in a prefix.  The whole
> > idea is to have a Gentoo package manager installing Gentoo stuff in
> > it's own little corner of the filesystem.  We DO want to keep
> > gentoo-osx as compatible as possible with all the __other gentoo
> > arch's__ so that we can leverage all the good work being done for
> > those arches.
>
> I think that the first target will be to have maximum compatability with
> other Gentoo projects, then we can examine which tools we can use from
> the OS without causing trouble (to minimise the install).  I'd like to
> get it functionally working first.  I don't think we kill an alternative
> path by doing so.

The point is that the policy shouldn't encourage the use of names that 
aren't needed. Also, the policy shouldn't encourage the use of g-prefixes 
at all before there is agreement on a plan to provide them in a way that 
is sufficiently flexible -- otherwise, -alt will only get blamed for more 
ugly distro specific special cases.

-f
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