Edward Middleton <emiddle...@bebear.net> wrote: > > ghc 6.8.3 is /usr/bin/ghc on my office Mac, but nothing in the world > > prevents there being some other program called ghc that would also > > like to be there. Only by painstaking verification of a whole > > bunch of applications together can one be confident of "safety". > > Well then I guess we agree, so the question becomes who should do the > painstaking verification. I think distribution maintainers should do > this, you think end users who can't compile source packages should do > this. > Not the maintainers, but the tool. Portage doesn't install stuff if it would overwrite other things, records changes to files in e.g. /etc to be merged later (interactively, with diffs), and records every file it ever installed by having the package install itself in /var/portage/<package>/<version>. You are _completely_busted_ if your install script doesn't support that: The script runs sandboxed.
Portage even registers every installed package into an empty ghc package database, and merges them later. It knows what it does. I can switch between different versions of packages, or different implementations of the same functionality (say, java-sun vs. java-blackdown) with eselect. In short: Don't write your own install scripts, you're bound to get it wrong, and/or be vastly inferior, compared to portage. -- (c) this sig last receiving data processing entity. Inspect headers for copyright history. All rights reserved. Copying, hiring, renting, performance and/or quoting of this signature prohibited. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe