Ciaran McCreesh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> posted [EMAIL PROTECTED], excerpted below, on Tue, 09 Sep 2008 00:38:48 +0100:
> People shouldn't be writing ebuilds to do that at all. They should be > using a package manager provided tool that lets them keep track of > ebuild-less packages in a way that integrates properly with everything > else. I did mention package.provided, which is your PM provided tool... but there's some serious negatives to doing it that way, including the lack of an uninstall, package manifest, record of CFLAGS and etc used, all as automatically provided by the PM for the relatively low cost of a rudimentary ebuild. It doesn't take much of a user-sysadmin to recognize at least /some/ of those merits and thus not be satisfied with bypassing them. No familiarity with Gentoo is needed for that recognition, tho it might help in the recognition it's actually (more easily) possible for a mere human to implement on Gentoo, as opposed to a specfile based distribution, say. As Donnie said in his post made while I was composing mine, it's the "entry level ebuild hack that just gets people in the door and is the reason a lot of people love Gentoo." I'm certainly one of them. I loved being able to jump right in, and while I've certainly progressed in understanding and ability since then, that accessibility, the openness of the entire Gentoo system including the ebuilds, continues to be one of the primary distinctions of Gentoo that holds me here; one of the biggest reasons it seems to "just fit" so much better than most other distributions, despite the (comparatively minor) hassles of continually updating from source. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
