On Mon, 22 May 2000, Alex Hayes wrote:
>
> mostly due to my experience over at linuxnewbie.org, where many questions
> are "i've downloaded ______.tar.gz, now what do i do to install?"
>
It's almost impossible to write a generic front end for this. How would
you handle dependencies? Conflicts with already installed versions of
things?
The BSD ports system handles this on a "tarball by tarball" basis. Someone
figures out what needs to be done to install Software X in FreeBSD. Then
they write a front end script for it.
You cd /usr/ports/x11/kde2
make install
The required source tarballs are then fetched for you,
untarred/gzed/bzed/etc, needed patches applied... ./configure is run, then
compiled and installed.
Dependencies are handled as needed too. The packages that kde depends upon
also have their own Makefiles in the ports tree, so it switches there,
works on foo, then returns to kde.
FreeBSD is really a source distribution, where rpm- and deb-based Linux
distros are binary distributions.
Then we get into cvsup, make world, etc... :-) But that's off-topic. hehe
--
Stuart Krivis [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Fourth law of programming:
Anything that can go wrong wi
sendmail: segmentation violation - core dumped
