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GoboLinux Compile -- A Scalable Portage?

Posted by timothy on from the telling-the-bits-where-to-go dept.

LodeRunner writes "The GoboLinux team, featured about a year ago for creating a distro that does away with Unix paths such as /usr/bin and /lib and uses things like /System/Settings/X11 instead, just released a new release where they introduce their own alternative to Portage and similar systems: Compile. But is yet another source-based compilation system needed?" Read a bit more below on why the GoboLinux folks think so.

LodeRunner continues "We already have ebuilds, RPM .spec files, and whatnot. The argument for reinventing the wheel yet again was the observation that while developing apps to handle these files is easy, the task of maintaining the ever-growing database of compilation scripts is the real problem -- the huge package collection of Debian comes to mind. Compile took the extreme minimalistic approach, and its scripts ("recipes") are as small as can be: the script for a typical autoconf-based program takes two lines.

Knowledge for handling common situations is usually added to Compile itself instead of being coded in the script (for example, apps that need a separate build directory just add a needs_build_dir=yes line). The plan is to make Compile as smart as it can and the recipes as small as possible.

It remains to be seen whether this experiment of gauging differently the tradeoff between flexibility and simplicity will prove itself to be limiting or enlightening, but in the ~six months Compile has been in beta test by the people from the GoboLinux mailing list, over 500 recipes were written, ranging from Glibc and GCC up to KDE and the Linux kernel itself."

8 of 366 comments (clear)

  1. WHAT? by ajutla · · Score: 5, Funny

    "Does away with" /usr/bin and /lib?


    BLASPHEMY!!! They're SINNERS! How DARE they mess with the SACRED directory structure! Et cetera! Et cetera! Ad nauseam!


    ...In all seriousness, though, that does sound kind of like an interesting concept--might make things easier for people to understand. Me, I like my three letter unpronounceable paths all the same :)

  2. Uhmm by NitsujTPU · · Score: 5, Funny

    But is yet another source-based compilation system needed?

    Uhmm... I guess not, from now on, we'll do all of our compilations without source code... however that will supposedly be done.

  3. Re: A job for ln? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    >mkdir /System
    >mkdir /System/Settings

    Argh.
    mkdir -p /System/Settings

  4. Re:All I want is SATA RAID support by Nasarius · · Score: 4, Funny
    Debian and Gentoo are the only ones, AFAIK, that do, and they both are teh suck.

    Nice, you just managed to enrage the two biggest groups of Linux zealots in one go. :-)

    --
    LOAD "SIG",8,1
  5. Re:It works for Gentoo by Zork+the+Almighty · · Score: 2, Funny

    But... but... "It's UNIX, I know this!"

    --

    In Soviet America the banks rob you!
  6. Re:All I want is SATA RAID support by benjonson · · Score: 3, Funny

    Debian and Gentoo are the only ones, AFAIK, that do, and they both are teh suck.

    Nice, you just managed to enrage the two biggest groups of Linux zealots in one go. :-)

    Nonsense. Now emacs and vi: those are teh suck.
    --
    =-+
  7. Re:Emerge by prepp · · Score: 2, Funny

    all i'm gonna say is this, http://funroll-loops.org , Enjoy Zealots!

    --
    "There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do NOT wave in a Vacuum " --Arthur C Clarke
  8. Oh! My! God! by The+Infamous+Grimace · · Score: 3, Funny

    Now if they fix cut and paste and find a way to make havening both a *nix and a windows version as close as possible to a simple recompile...


    It's George!

    (tig)
    --
    Ignorance and prejudice and fear
    Walk hand in hand