On Wed, May 02, 2001 at 07:56:46AM -0700, Jeff Bailey wrote: > 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?
The benefit is that you can set it up to compile things optimized for your prosessor this reminds me of the gentoo GNU/Linux distro that I stumbled accross a while back they were using the same type of system but with GNU/Linux, seemed pretty cool actually. Eseentially your system should be a lot faster as most packages are built for i386. > 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. That's a very kewl idea and I have never thought about that...yeah GNU is an entire system so this would make sense. Dan -- Daniel E Baumann [EMAIL PROTECTED] Web location: http://www.msoe.edu/~baumannd And if cynics ridicule freedom, ridicule community...if ``hard nosed realists'' say that profit is the only ideal...just ignore them, and use copyleft all the same. -- RMS
