On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 10:33 PM, USM Bish <bish at airtelmail.in> wrote: > On Mon, Dec 21, 2009 at 10:10 PM, Sriram Narayanan <sriramnrn at gmail.com> > wrote: >> > [ some snipped ] >> >> Other formats and package managers >> - ebuilds, pacman >> > > Was any thought given towards source build systems like gentoo "portage" > or FreeBSD ports ?? > > Portage, is written in Python, meaning you can adapt it with lesser effort > for a Sun compiler instead of gcc. Ports need writing Makefiles. >
Portage is a debatable platform. Gentoo is losing popularity. While the ebuild framework is great for doing automated builds it is debatable whether a user would like to have builds run for days on end just in order to do a full upgrade. I for one will hate that. In addition laptop users will absolutely hate it. So Ebuilds only for building is actually fine and very flexible indeed. But for binary packaging, RPM or Deb or Arch package format is needed. In addition Using spec files has some practical advantages: 1) BeleniX already has a large repertoire of spec files 2) BeleniX borrows a bunch of patches and some build recipes from Fedora which is all spec files. Arguably Fedora today is one of the best architected Linux distros out there. I am very impressed with the quality of their Spec files. 3) BeleniX builds Gnome stuff from the JDS repo which is all Pkgbuild spec files. 4) We would like to re-use existing stuff as much as possible with as little work. Regards, Moinak. -- ================================ http://www.belenix.org/ http://moinakg.wordpress.com/
