Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: "Bruce A. Locke" <blocke@××××××.org>
To: gentoo-dev@g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] prefix overide portage
Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2002 14:01:55
Message-Id: 1014148834.1352.13.camel@kodiak.chronospace.org
In Reply to: [gentoo-dev] prefix overide portage by Matt Doughty
1 On Tue, 2002-02-19 at 09:13, Matt Doughty wrote:
2 > Hi,
3 > I hate to start by complaining or critisizing what I consider a
4 > wonderful project. I'm basically a NetBSD user who is looking
5 > for functionality(hardware 3d support) that linux has, and
6 > NetBSD is lacking. I was working through the install, and ran
7 > into a couple oddities/annoyances. I noticed that alot of
8 > packages in portage statically set the install prefix.
9
10 Yes alot of packages are setup that way. I'm of a mixed opinion if
11 thats a good or a bad thing. If we do decide to make it more
12 configurable down the road its going to require alot of ebuild touchups,
13 etc. Alot of configure scripts require path information to headers,
14 assume files are in various locations, etc. I can tell from experience
15 if you set a less-then-common prefix many configure scripts are going to
16 break on you (meaning we'd have to hack on a bunch of them :(
17
18 > I find this to be very undesirable behavior, and was wondering if
19 > this is temporary or has noone complained about this rather
20 > rigid structure?
21
22 Don't think many people have complained of it yet :)
23
24 > From my perspective a system should be divided
25 > in this manner:
26 >
27 > base system (kernel, and userland): --prefix=/, and --prefix=/usr
28 > package system installed pkgs: --prefix=/usr/pkg
29 >
30 > X system: --prefix=/usr/X11R6
31 > this leaves /usr/local, and /opt for hand built packages. In NetBSD
32 > the base system is completely seperate from the package system, and
33 > the package system, and X prefixes can be overridden by the
34 > enviroment variables LOCALBASE, and X11BASE respectively. I love
35 > the overall design of the system, and clean nature of the /etc
36 > directory. I would be happy to help make the needed changes to
37 > allow for this increased flexibility.
38
39 Gentoo makes no distinction between its "core" and packages. Every part
40 of the core (kernel, glibc, etc) is treated _exactly_ the same as any
41 other package. Portage handles compiling and package manangement
42 (except for the kernel, you still have to compile that yourself ;) We
43 used to split gnome, kde, etc up into /opt/kde, etc but it later became
44 a mess.
45
46 /usr/X11R6 on gentoo is currently only really used by XFree86
47 packages... All X programs go under /usr not /usr/X11R6. (We also have
48 /usr/kde/2 and /usr/kde/3 for kde so users can have the stable kde2
49 installed while playing with kde 3-cvs).
50
51 The only package I'm aware of that touches /usr/local is apache, and
52 that ebuild is in the process of being rewritten.
53
54 /opt is used for those packages which can't be easily made to fit within
55 a FHS compliant file system. For instance java packages are not
56 designed to be installed in /usr/bin, etc without alot of hassle...
57
58
59 > --Matt
60 > _______________________________________________
61 > gentoo-dev mailing list
62 > gentoo-dev@g.o
63 > http://lists.gentoo.org/mailman/listinfo/gentoo-dev
64 >
65 --
66
67 Bruce A. Locke
68 blocke@××××××.org

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-dev] prefix overide portage Dave Lee <davel@××××××.com>