[gentoo-alt] Re: Prefix-standalone profile has upgraded into dev

[Michael Haubenwallner]

Benda, congrats for getting $subject done!

On 9/30/19 8:25 AM, Fabian Groffen wrote:
> On 30-09-2019 09:28:17 +0800, Benda Xu wrote:
>> Jacob Godserv <jacobgodserv@×××××.com> writes:
>>
>>> Wow! This is huge! Congratulations to the Prefix team for their hard
>>> work and the unofficial volunteers that supported them! This has been
>>> so long in the making I resigned myself to it never
>>> happening. Incredible!
>>
>> Thank you Jacob.  It has been a long journey since around ~2005
>> (@Fabian, correct me if I am wrong).  Prefix has gradually matured over
>> the years, with love from all of us in the community.
>
> I joined in 2005.  At that time there were a few hundreds of packages
> keyworded for ~ppc-macos.  Main people that had been working on there
> (that I know of) were ferringb, kito, pvdabeel, gongloo and j4rg0n.  The
> project started as Gentoo for Mac OS X.

Ah - now even myself does understand why Prefix was raising that fast!

> Around 2008 this became Gentoo
> Prefix (as we know it today) because a shift was made from installing
> "missing" software on Mac OS X in the usual locations (/usr/bin, etc.)
> to installing replacement software in a different location, replacing
> host software, and therefore relying as little as possible on that
> software.  Initially it was easy to use Mac OS X's provided software,
> because it was up-to-date, but as time went, the software became
> outdated (think of automake/autoconf, often a problem) and problematic
> (Apple-specific modifications, or unfixed bugs because of old versions).
> Thus the only way forward was to install as much as possible Gentoo
> "versions", the sole aim of Gentoo Prefix.
>
>> The feeling that Prefix would remain an experimental project was real.
>> But as the quality of Prefix steadily grows, we could envision it to be
>> of production level hereafter.
>
> I'm happy to see it more mature for the Linux platforms.  We've always
> been struggling to keep it "working".  Historically, the macOS "target"
> was best supported, followed by Solaris, but as these platforms
> continued to evolve, or age, we couldn't always keep up fixing the
> packages and bootstrap process.  Even today this is the case.
>
> There were a lot of contributors as wel as Gentoo devs that came and
> went over the years, making countless efforts and spending many hours to
> analyse, test and fix packages, processes or scenarios.  For those of
> you, if you're still watching, your input has been vital for making the
> project what it has become today.  It's still running, and for some
> scenarios still working fine/being super useful.

Absolutely, as at work I'm in the process of finalizing the third internal
fork of Prefix Guest+Stack for Linux and Windows (MSVC via Cygwin)!

Thanks to all of you, and also to Sammy Pfeiffer for directing myself
into Azure Build Pipelines and docker to perform Prefix CI bootstraps!

/haubi/

>
> Thanks a lot,
> Fabian
>
>
>> Big cheers to us all.
>>
>> Yours,
>> Benda
>>
>