-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1
On Sunday, January 20, 2002, at 01:43 PM, Martin Costabel wrote: > Gordon Messmer wrote: >> >> On Fri, 2002-01-18 at 03:38, Max Horn wrote: > >>> * Move to a new package format - yes or no, and which. This has to be >>> carefully designed, I think. > > I vote NO. There are excellent reasons for staying with the present > format. IMHO one of the secrets of Fink's spectacular success is just > this extreme simplicity of the format of the info files. If you > complicate this, like with XML where you need special tools for editing, > or with rpm which is much more complex, you will loose many of the > package contributors. I don't mean you shouldn't add (carefully > selected) additional features, but please keep the simple human readable > and writable text format. Quite frankly, the current format isn't flexible enough. Some sort of modules/variants support is really needed, if only because all of the -nox and -osx and -whatever packages are going to start cluttering the list of packages, which will make it harder to find the package you want, etc. Another reason for modules/variants support: I am in the middle of building GRASS for the umpteenth time so that I can get as many of its modules into the GRASS package as possible. (On my computer, at least, the GRASS package in CVS doesn't actually build the PostgreSQL or ODBC modules. ) It takes two or more hours to build GRASS (with nice -n -20, at that) with all of its modules. Let's say someone doesn't want/need PostgreSQL support in GRASS. Should I create a grass-pgsql package? What about grass-atlas, grass-odbc, grass-tcltk, grass-gl, etc? With modules, I could create a GRASS package and bundle a bunch of optional modules into it. I have to admit, simplicity is compelling. I really like how easy it is to write an .info file. However, I think that XML can be almost as simple, especially if the file format works with /Developer/Applications/PropertyListEditor.app. Just my 2 cents. Daniel - -- PGP public key: http://mwdesign.dyndns.org/~daniel/publickey.txt ACA4 FA04 4033 0569 C626 AA1A C489 25A5 5F67 C125 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (Darwin) Comment: For info see http://www.gnupg.org iD8DBQE8S0vPxIklpV9nwSURAoaXAJ9Qkvvh9JrZt/dVNRkQKRwuzaZyeQCg8X8F id23wUzZc5wtexaZs3Ade/Y= =Jwa6 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- _______________________________________________ Fink-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/fink-devel
