On Wed, May 02, 2001 at 10:04:33AM -0400, Russell Francis wrote: > I am rather new to the list but, if you are thinking of new ways to > package and distribute a shiny new Hurd system I have a suggestion. > I used to use FreeBSD and I absolutely loved the ports collection! > You simply change to the directory of the program you want and type > make install. It fetches the source, builds it and installs it. It > was by far the easiest system to maintain ever. I think the Hurd > could benefit a great deal from a system much like the BSD ports > collection.
2 things: 1) In what way would it benefit? 2) On a working Hurd system, if you untar all of the required source packages, and write a master autoconf file to chain to all of the directories in the correct order. If you're clever, you can ask them to share a cache file which will speed up the detection process, and chain the appropriate --prefix, --sysdir. IIRC, that was one of the original visions of autoconf, was configuring the whole GNU system at once. I think it basically turned out that few of us wanted to do that, because I've never heard anyone talk about it. Tks, Jeff Bailey
