On Tue, Jun 20, 2006 at 11:46:35AM -0400, Laszlo (Laca) Peter wrote: > install-libxml2, install-libxml2-64: now these are really weird things, > in my opinion. Instead of running "make install DESTDIR=foo", SFW uses > custom scripts that copy the files from the source tree to the > "proto area"[3], listing each file, setting the permissions, copying > libs from libtool's .libs (temporary) directory. Not very nice, to say > the least.
Yes, these are very awkward and tricky to get right. Worse is that there's also Target_dirs which often needs changing too. > is redirected (using the DESTDIR Makefile variable) to a per-package > proto area[3]. This means that by default, any files that the community > maintainers intended to install are installed, and to the correct This would have prevented (for example): 6341017 GNU ld can't find its own ld scripts > (relative) locations. Then we remove any files that we decided not to > deliver, for example lib*.a, lib*.la. This is the opposite of SFW's > philosophy, where we decide which files we wish to deliver and deal with > them one by one. We are now ready to create packages. Pkgmaps are > created dynamically from glob lists. Having used both SFW and JDS's build systems (and "coming from" ON), I certainly agree that I prefer JDS's approach. It's far easier to deal with a list of what files get installed and decide what to remove than it is to deal with a built source tree and decide what to install. On a slightly philosophical note, it also encourages fixes to be taken upstream: if the install is putting things in the wrong place, then the fix 'naturally' goes in the source tarball, rather than some "fix everything up" script. A change would imply, though, that each package (or set of packages from a single source package) has its own "proto area". This might be a problem for some people, and it's certainly non-ON-like, but I can't see any real issues with it. Using spec files might be a little bit more controversial though; but even a bespoke version of this would be preferable IMHO. regards john
