Hugh Sasse Staff Elec Eng <hgs / dmu.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>On Mon, 18 Dec 2000, Matt Licholai wrote:
>
> > Here are what I feel the Debian packaging system can do rather well 
>(from
> > the end user perspective):
> >
> >     Standardized file/directory location
>
>This is something I detest.  When I have setup my system to have
>system software in one place, downloaded software for the whole
>network in antother place, and machine specific code in a third place,
>I do _not_ want some package telling me that I must put the software
>in x/y/z.  This is what really annoys me about Imake.
>
>I would plead for one level of indirection: allow me to setup the
>standard places at configuration time.  Default values are acceptable,
>of course.  I could do this when I configure Ruby, and then the
>downloaded apps could ask me if my settings are what I wanted.

This is exactly what Perl does.  Perl's system has a standard
search path that you can see with the following command:

  perl -MData::Dumper -e 'print Dumper \@INC'

The defined locations in order stand for:
- OS-specific core packages
- OS-independent core packages
- OS-specific installed packages
- OS-independent installed packages
- current working directory

The separation of OS-specific and OS-independent is for the
benefit of people serving packages off of a fileserver that
are picked up on multiple operating systems.  I am not sure
how much this facility is being used.  The most commonly
felt need not addressed by the system is the ability for
users to do local installs.  Therefore I would suggest that

(at least for *nix) the following might work better:

- Core Ruby
- Globally installed packages
- User installed packages

I have more to say, but I will say it on the wiki. :-)

Cheers,
Ben
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