On Fri, Jul 14, 2006 at 12:33:22PM -0700, Doug Barton wrote: > Dejan Lesjak wrote: > > On Friday 14 July 2006 08:58, Maxim Sobolev wrote: > >> What's the gain? > > > > I believe I mentioned some of gains in first mail. There is also the > > benefit > > of less divergence to upstreams as ./configure scripts of various ports > > use /usr/local as default prefix, but more importantly as modular X.org is > > becoming more widespread there is tendency of various packagers (for > > example > > Linux distributions already mentioned) to install all packages under same > > prefix. We expect that if we follow that trend, we would make maintainers > > and > > users' lives a bit easier in the long run. > > Note, I am still making up my mind about whether what you're proposing is a > good idea or not, so I'm not intending this as a criticism. However, the > argument you propose above as a benefit for the move is completely specious. > Our ports are supposed to be prefix-clean no matter what the defaults in the > distributed software are, and no matter what prefix the user chooses. Thus > (other than ports which are broken now which need fixing anyway), the only > thing this move will do is ADD work for maintainers (at least in the short > run), it will not make anyone's life easier in this area. > > I would also like to reinforce Maxim's point here, since I think it's > getting lost in the shuffle. The burden to the users is NOT just > reinstalling, which with modern tools like portmaster or portupgrade should > be pretty painless, if not time consuming. There is also the burden to our > users of editing config files, firefox app preferences, etc. etc. Some of > these can be handled automatically by the ports, many of them cannot.
Assuming we deal with all the conflicting ports in the first round I don't fully buy this argument. If most people can simply upgrade the ports in question then "rm -rf /usr/X11RC && ln -s /usr/local /usr/X11R6" will take care of config files. That's admittedly a large assumption, but I don't think it's all that unreasonable. I think the argument for this change is that the use of X11BASE is pretty much random so it's no longer serving any useful purpose and the lack of consistency is a minor negative since you never know where an X related port will end up without reading the Makefile. -- Brooks
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