Marc Espie wrote:
On Fri, Oct 07, 2005 at 05:14:59PM -0400, Chuck Robey wrote:
Marc Espie wrote:
You're not a serious developer, you just tinker with stuff...
You know, I'be been as careful as I could be, never to insult any of
you. You know me very little, but you need to support your argument,
and I guess you need to insult.
- Installing your own gettext is rather dangerous, unless you really
know what you are doing. Especially these days, because we are adding
i18n to the base system.
It's not so terribly dangerous as all that, moreover, nothing i do to my
own system affects your at all. If I take responsibiliity for my own
system, then (as long as it removes none of your control, and I've
already demonstated at least one method to do that, I'm certain that I
didn't pick either the only way or the best way) then this wouldn't
bother your system goals at all.
I spent years doing FreeBSD ports. about 10. Yes, you need to stay
awake, but as long as you don't mind talking care of things, it's not so
bad, not nearly as bad as you are playing it.
Well, I've spent enough time working on i18n to tell you that, yes,
it is more dangerous than that. Other people working on this stuff,
naddy for instance, could tell you the same thing.
It's not only staying awake, it's figuring out weeks later that the
stuff that almost works that you see is coming from THAT specific
change and not from anything else.
I don't care that it's your machine or not, I'm just saying it's
dangerous.
You are doing some non-serious, dangerous tinkering there. If you don't
see the link now that it's explicit, and you still think I'm insulting
you, your loss...
OK, then how about a have "local-1"? I would like, if I install some
shared lib in /usr/local-1/lib, to have it not only found, but have it
override (in terms of DEPENDS) any lib in /usr/local, or any
ports-controlled lib. If I agree that I must take all blame for any
problems in such a system, folks in FreeBSD, which runs like that (and
has for years) don't seem to be all that worried.
Knobs are an issue, for various reasons. We do provide some. Not that many.
Because each of them takes a lot of time to support.
You might think it's just a convenient knob for you, but it has a big cost.
Each option we add is carefully weighted.
I'll make you a deal: once we've finished making sure all ports are clean
if you tinker with LOCALBASE, X11BASE or SYSCONFDIR, I'll have a look
at something that would allow you to install some stuff elsewhere.
One final point: the apparent complexity of the dependencies in the
OpenBSD ports system is real. It's what allows pkg_add -u to work,
and YES, there are rather difficult issues to solve...
I would be quite a fool to argue with you on the last point (I have, in
the past, tinkered with FreeBSD's bsd.ports.mk file, and in fact, I
still think it's the best learning tool for make(1) ever written). Am
I being innocent, in asking, that time interval, "once we've finished
making sure ...", is that a time that's ever going to end? It seems, as
it's written, it won't ever end (I wouldnt ever agree that enough had
ever been done).
Ah, well, I will gladly let it go, anyway.
