Note: Again, please Cc in any replies me as I am not on the list. Bob Proulx, on 2002-03-24, wrote:
> I believe a better solution is to use a tool specifically designed to > do packaging. Either rpm or dpkg are excellent tools for this > purpose. I do agree that specially-designed packaging tools such as these tend to be the most optimal. Of course, however, there are issues in trying to build around these systems, and I don't think we'll ever really move away from lots of people using "make install", however. Also, I'm not quite sure of where this argument might go, but there might be something to be said that there is significant functional difference between "logging" and "package installing". That thought just popped into my head but I'm not sure it's valid... > Probably it is safe to say that most GNU based tar files are created > using automake. The ones that don't are more of the exception than the > rule. Not to nitpick, but personally plan on releasing a small C-helper program that I'll be using make to setup/install, but not using the full-blown automake/configure setup. I do admit I'll be in the far minority, though :) > Therefore in order to really make use of an install enhancement you > would have to get the automake team to buy into it. I'm not sure of the benefits of necessarily tying install to automake as you suggest it is... Also, of course, the fact that it often is tied to automake currently doesn't mean it will be so in the future. > However, there has been discussion on supporting automatically producing > a package file for either rpm or deb. > > See also > http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/automake/2001-November/009851.html > and http://www.gyve.org/~jet/autopack The autopack scheme does seem nifty. There are advantages to such a tactic. I just thought of a killer problem with depending on automake, however. Consider non-automake install(1)-using systems, such as Perl modules. An automake solution doesn't help there. I just checked the archive of this list and lo to my behold I see a post today "Logging of INSTALLed files..". Now, I didn't post that (and I don't know the poster, honestly!), but I happened to implement precisely what the author was suggesting. I think the advantage of my technique was simplicity without too much of a change to install as it currently is. Since install is fairly independent, I think that having a unixy poor-man's solution built into it increases its functionality significantly. While I've never built a automake-derived rpm, maybe the INSTALL_LOG would help you determine what actually gets installed. I know that in FreeBSD's ports system there have been problems making sure the pkg-plist for a port accurately reflects what was installed. Of course, one workaround solution around this is to install to an empty directory root, but there can be issues with that. Take whatever you want in this message as being slightly jaded since I wrote a patch and hence boosted my ego :) -- Frank Tobin http://www.neverending.org/~ftobin/ _______________________________________________ Bug-fileutils mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-fileutils
