On Thu, 10 Nov 2005, Grobian wrote:
> > > But, it seems to me that there is a good compromise, along the lines > > > of Diego's eselect proposal (similar to Debian's /etc/alternatives). > > > We could use eselect or similar to maintain a "symlink farm" of > > > g-prefixed symlinks to the GNU binaries. A baselayout revision could > > > safely permit a Gentoo-wide policy whereby such gfoo binaries could > > > be called from any boot script, tool script etc. In this way, you > > > can avoid having to special case the distro in ebuilds and scripts, > > > and you can avoid pulling in redundant deps on systems that ship the > > > same binaries without g-prefixes. On those systems, the vendor > > > package could just be "eselected" to create the symlinks, and indeed > > > the baselayout for such systems could ship with the symlinks already > > > in place. > > > > Assuming I understand your point correctly (which is debatable), that > > is an awfully complicated solution whose primary aim seems to ensure > > that you don't confuse /some/prefix/bin/someutil with > > /usr/bin/someutil by turning one into a symlink to the other. If you > > need to figure out which util is called by default in your shell > > session, try using 'which'. If you need to _ensure_ that you use OS X > > utils while in a shell, a simpler solution would be to not put the > > gentoo directories in $PATH in the first place. > > eselect is a nice idea, but only useful for the user. Portage will > always prefer to use it's 'own' tools, IMHO. Yes, eselect is not really neede. I don't expect the user to need to move symlinks around too often. > If a user wants to use OSX/xargs instead of GNU/xargs, that user should > fiddle with his/her path, don't source the Gentoo prefix script or place > a symlink to OSX/xargs in his/her ~/bin (and make that one come first in > the path). The g-prefixed symlinks aren't there for the users' benefit, they create a uniform environment for gentoo scripts and ebuilds regardless of distro. > > > > That is the only way I can see for compatibility both with the > > > variety of Darwin distros, and with the variety of Gentoo OS's. > > > > Why would Gentoo need to stay compatible with "Darwin distros"? OS X > > isn't going anywhere if you install Gentoo in a prefix. The whole > > idea is to have a Gentoo package manager installing Gentoo stuff in > > it's own little corner of the filesystem. We DO want to keep > > gentoo-osx as compatible as possible with all the __other gentoo > > arch's__ so that we can leverage all the good work being done for > > those arches. > > I think that the first target will be to have maximum compatability with > other Gentoo projects, then we can examine which tools we can use from > the OS without causing trouble (to minimise the install). I'd like to > get it functionally working first. I don't think we kill an alternative > path by doing so. The point is that the policy shouldn't encourage the use of names that aren't needed. Also, the policy shouldn't encourage the use of g-prefixes at all before there is agreement on a plan to provide them in a way that is sufficiently flexible -- otherwise, -alt will only get blamed for more ugly distro specific special cases. -f -- [email protected] mailing list
