On 20/3/06, Carlos Eduardo de Brito Novaes wrote:
>Are you moving packages like this for any special reason? I mean, seens to
> require some knowledgment that would be very usefull for a package management
> system (an old project that I never had the time to study and implement). ;)
> Would you be so kind to report us your sucess?
Ok, after all this time, my little experiment has ground to a halt,
for various reasons. So, I guess it's time to report what I found -
I was aiming for relocatable packages. Unfortunately, for
compile-from-source, this seems basically impossible - as I discovered
from the issue that started this thread in the first place, the
problem isn't any hard-coded prefixes in the package (relocatable
after modifying a couple of files is still kindof relocatable, so long
as the files are a simple format), but there are hard-coded paths in
*other* packages. *.la files are relatively easy once you get used to
them: find /usr /opt -name *.la -exec sed -i s/oldpath/newpath/g {}\;
tends to do an excellent job.
Several core gnome things (most notably atk, pango, and gconf) do not
appear to be binary relocatable. atk and pango had problems with
pkg-config: it seemed to forget that they existed until they were
recompiled, even after making sure that the appropriate dirs were in
PKG_CONFIG_PATH. I have no idea why this is. GConf appears to
hard-code the path to the executable in it's libraries - if you move
it (even keeping all paths up to date), any app that uses it will
complain that it can't find /usr/bin/gconfd . Symlinking all of it's
binaries back into /usr/bin didn't help the situation any - apps that
were previously complaining now break without giving any error. The
solution was to recompile gconf, although binreloc [
http://autopackage.org/docs/binreloc/ ] may help.
pkgconfig's *.pc files need updating every move, but this ia generally
fairly trivial (to my understanding, they exist mainly so that other
packages *don't* need to hard-code dependancy paths). Aside from the
issues with atk and pango mentioned above, I didn't have any problems
with pkg-config besides forgetting to update the prefix.
Also, I have (re-)found a package management solution I like a little
better than this (I decided once before I didn't like it and certain
elements of it are un-Unixy, but I've since changed my mind :)) -
http://0install.net .
(ps. Please keep me cc'd to replies)
--
Lennon Victor Cook
"He who receives an idea from me receives without lessening, as he who
lights his candle at mine receives light without darkening" - Thomas
Jefferson
--
http://linuxfromscratch.org/mailman/listinfo/blfs-support
FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html
Unsubscribe: See the above information page
