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On Sat, Jun 14, 2003 at 01:20:05PM +0900, Jason Creighton wrote:
> <rant>
> I'm just sick of seeing every Linux distro having its own little package
> manager. I'm sick of looking at the instructions for packaging something for
> distro X that goes something like this: 
> 
> "Prefix in /usr, don't link against X, be sure to link against Y, etc, etc".
> 
> ie, each distro has rules set out that each package must follow.
> 
> Why can't we just have some metadata with each package describing what options
> it supports. Then our package manager could just say to package X:
> 
> "Okay, I want X11 support with GTK widgets, prefix is /usr/local, strip
> binaries, don't install the manpages, and install the package in
> /tmp/lala-1234 so we can record what files are in the package before we
> install it in /usr/local".

You mean like Gentoo? :)


> The nice thing about this approach is that we would only have to package stuff
> *once*. And then build the software differently for each configuration needed.

Yup!  You want Gentoo.


> I have vague ideas about
> this software taking "steps" (download, extract, build, install) so that we
> could take a package from any step and complete it. That is, we could have one
> PC doing builds for a network of 100 that would pick up at the "install" step.
> Or something like that.
> 
> Also, how all the options a package has would be tricky to represent.

Take a look at Gentoo.


- -- 
Daniel Carrera         | OpenPGP fingerprint:
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