Finn Thain wrote:
That is not the primary aim. I'll try and explain it better. Here are
three scenarios:
- prefix on foriegn distro
(e.g. Debian, Fedora, upstream BSD, Sun Solaris GNU/Solaris, Apple Mac OS,
OpenDarwin, GNU/Darwin...)
- progressive on foreign distro
(same examples)
- single package manager
(e.g. Gentoo Darwin, Gentoo Solaris, Gentoo *BSD, Gentoo Linux)
Now, when you adopt the Gentoo/Alt (read Gentoo BSD) policy that says "In
a Gentoo/ALT system profile, you can always find these tools ... gsed ...
gmake ... gawk ... gpatch ... gdiff ... gfind ... gxargs", you encourage
everyone to special case an alt system, and then use these names in their
scripts instead of the Gentoo Linux names.
Now I see your complaint. I didn't see that when skimming the website.
In my early days in the project I once suggested to use a special
directory with symlinks like "sed -> /usr/bin/gsed" (where gsed was only
to avoid collision) and have that directory first in the path by setting
it in profile.bashrc. This idea would solve the `find . | xargs`
problem, but was rejected because it was considered to be a dirty hack,
aliases worked fine for most cases too, and of course the work of
Flameeyes to just get people using the right (non-GNU) syntax. The
extra directory with symlinks would just be a sort of simulated prefix
situation. No biggy, but I'd still prefer it over aliasing sed to gsed.
For the policy; I think we should have a discussion on these g-prefixed
variants. Personally, I think they suck, just because of their name.
Sun has shown with Solaris that you can use directories to have multiple
versions/editions of the same programs. (Only on Solaris it's a bit
confusing sometimes...)
Adding more packages on a prefixed system is bad news for different
reasons. Imagine you are a sysadmin (I am) and you have hundreds of users
that want to effectively do "emerge system" in their home directories,
when they could just use the host tools instead! If I was one of those
users, probably fast running out of quota, I'd start sending patches or
reporting bugs to Gentoo.
Well... as user you have the strange thing to always dislike the OS
provided stuff, just because (random rant) "everything on Fedora sucks!".
Back to your (IMHO) valid comment: yes, it would be great if it would be
possible to only install xfig-3.2.5 using portage, just as it works on
OSX right now, without having to emerge a compiler and loads of depends
first.
Question for me there is, do we have to priorise there? I am a user at
work, and I have a nice workstation, with a homedir being backupped, and
a lot of scratch on my local workstation. I won't miss a gig or 2 there.
It would always be possible for -alt to provide a pre-filled
package.provided for some known OS distributions that users can apply
themselves to get the behaviour as we now have on OSX.
An alternative (much more interesting) would be if portage could 'ask'
the host OS through some interfacing script/program if a certain program
is 'provided' and which version. In a RPM world something like `rpm -q
etc.` while on OSX perhaps only package.provided would suffice. Who
knows. I guess that this option would require portage to be extended
somewhat.
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.
Exactly. Only Gentoo stuff needs to have the symlinks in the path.
...or binaries...
--
Fabian Groffen
Gentoo for Mac OS X Project -- Interim Lead
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