Re: [gentoo-dev] POSIX shell and "portable"

[Michael Haubenwallner]

On Mon, 2007-11-05 at 23:18 +0000, Roy Marples wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-11-05 at 16:21 -0400, Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > we want the installed environment to be portable, not the build environment.
> > i do not see any benefit from forcing the build environment to be pure POSIX
> > compliant and i see many many detrimental problems.
>
> Oh I don't know. Imagine how cool it would be for starting a new port.
>
> 1) Install PM
> 2) Wang on a portage tree
> 3) emerge ready to go
>
> Obviously it's not quite that simple as portage requires python and
> pkgcore require python, paludis requires tr1-whatever libs - but that's
> the restriction of the PM used. Maybe one day Gentoo will have a PM that
> doesn't require any of that and is just written in C and sh, using POSIX
> libc where it can.
>
> But enough pipe dreaming :)

Stop dreaming: Some very rudimentary thing like this already exists:

To bootstrap an alt/prefix instance on AIX, HPUX, whatever-unix-without-
sufficient-GNU-userland, we're using some "prefix-launcher"[1].
This simply is a "package fetcher/patcher/builder/installer", where a
single package is defined by some ".build"-script, which is written in
plain bourne shell. You might (should) find some gentoo ideas if you
look inside it ;)

Now to install {python, bash, (prefix-)portage, wget, patch, diffutils,
findutils, gcc, etc.} one single command[2] (think "emerge system") does
it all, just requiring GNU make, /bin/sh being bourne shell, some ansi-c
compiler, some (non-GNU) tar, gunzip, (non-GNU) sed, (non-GNU) whatever.

So the only non-native (not installed by default) thing required is GNU
make, which is available as binary package without any dependencies for
each "unix" I've seen.

[1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/prefix-launcher/
[2] http://prefix-launcher.wiki.sourceforge.net/

/haubi/
-- 
Michael Haubenwallner
Gentoo on a different level

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