On Mon, 2 May 2005 19:02:29 -0500 Brian Harring <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: | State said problem for the general community. Guessing you're | referencing the issue/request that being able to manage home, and | 'global' installations? | | I'd still posit that the issue of installing to a user's home when | portage's base prefix is /usr/local (fex) is a seperate issue. What | you were requesting for vim plugins goes beyond haubi's initial | goals...
Ok, here's the main issue. Simply changing prefix isn't enough to automatically make every package in the tree work. A heck of a lot of them will need manual modification, and there's no easy way to figure out which these are. So... My suggested way around this was to have a variable in ebuilds. Call it something like ICANINSTALLTO (that name sucks, come up with something better), which defaults to ICANINSTALLTO="usr". Ebuilds which have been explicitly checked and designed by the maintainer for prefix installs get ICANINSTALLTO="usr prefix". This also allows us to do other cool stuff like ICANINSTALLTO="home", for things like vim and gkrellm plugins which can go in ~/.vim/ and ~/.gkrellm2/plugins/ respectively. Thing is, if we introduce the PREFIX feature, people will expect it to actually work. It won't, at least not straight away, because there are so many ebuilds that use more than econf to get the prefix figured out. By whitelisting we can at least display a nice "you can't install this package in a prefix" message. Another issue... Portage installs to /usr/local are no good, because there might be other non-portage installs there too. If we're installing to a prefix, we have to be the *only* thing installing there. No other packages, not even other manual installs. Yet another issue... As it stands, all deps must be installed into the given PREFIX. This is messy. Is there a way around this? This would be less of a problem with ICANINSTALLTO="home" -- presumably for these portage could pass a var to the ebuild telling it in which prefix to look for its deps. That'll do for now. I'll shoot some more holes in it once these have been figured out. -- Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Vim, Shell tools, Fluxbox, Cron) Mail : ciaranm at gentoo.org Web : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm
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