Achim Schneider wrote: > 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. > But who writes the ebuild[1] ? That said, on the various system I run I have over 100 custom ebuilds that I maintain. I can do this because most applications have standard sane build systems that install things in the regular places. Edward 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebuild _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
