On Sat, 25 Jun 2005, Jake Maciejewski wrote:
> ...
> ...
> I've been trying to build X with NetBSD's pkgsrc. Solaris and even
> SunPro compiler support is good for simple programs, but X is a big
> mess and I suspect bugs don't get reported because most people probably
> use the X server shipped with Solaris...

Jake --

Here's an idea for a quick-n-dirty approach: In theory (I think) one
could take all the files contained in all the Xorg packages from the
latest Nevada (Solaris Express) build and slap them onto a SchilliX
box. The nice thing is, as with the rest of SchilliX, these files are
already under an open-source license.

Then, if that worked, you would only need to build Window Managers and
X clients, many of which I know build cleanly on Solaris with pkgsrc.

BTW... I'm interested in your work with pkgsrc on Solaris. I've played
around with it a bit too. See:
http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/eric_boutilier?entry=unix_from_scratch_table_of

I find the whole design a bit hairball'ish though and wonder if maybe
Joerg Schilling's endeavor to start with a clean slate and with Solaris
as the prime target platform (his SPS project) is maybe the way to go.
It seems to me that an ideal solution might be to have SPS as the fetch
and auto-build system combined with either an open-source version of
the Solaris packaging tools (pkgadd/pkgrm) that's been enhanced to know
how to update packages; or an open-source version of the new Sun Update
Connection which is based on the Solaris patch system.

However, having said that, there are some really intriguing, somewhat
poorly understood features of pkgsrc that I never got a chance to look into:

1. A mechanism that converts a pkgsrc package into a Solaris (SVR4)
   package, called gensolpkg.

2. A mechanism that "assimilates" externally produced binary packages.
   This is what a *-bin package in pkgsrc is. Firefox-bin is a good
   example. When I told my pkgsrc build box to "cd firefox-bin;make
   install", much to my amazement, instead of trying to fetch-and-build
   it from source, it simply went and grabbed the already-built
   binaries from the Solaris contrib area on mozilla.org and integrated
   *those* binaries into my /usr/pkg/ tree.

--Eric
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