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 |