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GoboLinux Compile -- A Scalable Portage?
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."
I would tend to agree that breaking the paths would be bad, fourtunately they don't exactly do that.
/Programs/Xorg/6.7.0 and /Programs/KDE/3.2.2. Each file category (executables, libraries, headers) can also be accessed through unified symlink views, such as /System/Links/Libraries and /System/Links/Headers. These views match the legacy directories (/bin, /usr/include, /usr/local/share) and so on, achieving total Unix compatibility while keeping program directories completely self-contained."
What they do is provide a more intuitive (on the surface of it, it seems so to me, need more details to be shure) path system while maintaining compatability to the old system.
"In GoboLinux, each program resides in its own directory, such as
They claim thier systems is path agnostic.
this is a good thing imho. One of my (minor) pet peves is that the standard *nix path system is largely cryptic to joe user, and a pain in the butt even for the cluefull unless you have enough *nix experience to make it automatic.
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 with a few options/flags changed the year of linux as a major desktop contender will finally arive istead of forever being next year.
Mycroft
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I've recently switched from linux to OSX, and I've learned that the latter has some clever ideas (e.g. bundles) that can leverage developer effort. Given this context of learning by changing, my own view is that this new direction for linux is worth investigating ... not that I'll likely leave OSX anytime soon.
To be fair, this isn't even a new idea for Mac OS X. It came from NeXT.
The filesystem is the package manager
Every modern shell supports case-insensitive tab-completion. And in GoboLinux, this is enabled by default.
Try it, you might like it: on bash, just add
set-completion-ignore-case on
on your ~/.inputrc.
The filesystem is the package manager
And that's exactly what scripts such as GNU Stow do.
The 'foo' application is installed in '/usr/local/foo-v1.x', and symlinks are placed into /usr/local/bin so that it can be run.
This makes installation and removing applications simple - and you can share your applications across NFS if you're so inclined.
And no, OSX is not LSB compliant - go figure. :)
This might be nitpicking, but I think you didn't read what the first letter in 'LSB' stands for - Linux
If you're confused about how the directory hierarchy in a typical Unix-ish system should be setup, consult man hier, or if your distro failed to include that, see this hier man page.
And the muscular cyborg German dudes dance with sexy French Canadians
Yes, I basically agree with you. The Armagetron recipe shows the "ugly" side of recipes: the support for imperative constructs, which often slip in declarative systems (ask any functional programmer...).
:) What we're doing here is just trying a different approach. Time will tell if it produces revolutionary results. :)
In this particular example, I think the recipe author could have avoided the pre_build function using a patch instead. I recommend that very strongly to users, because patches are easier to maintain when writing a new recipe based on a existing one: patches make "rejects" when they change from one version to another, whereas that sed command will fail silently if the recipe writer is not careful. With a patch instead of the function, the Armagetron recipe would be reduced to 3 declarations.
But yeah, there are cases when ugly imperative functions will be impossible to avoid. This most likely means that the design of the project's build system is pretty screwed up.
What I, personally, try to do in those cases is, instead of writing a marvelously smart recipe, is to contribute a patch to the project itself. Most of the times, it's just $prefix-awareness missing, or something like that. Often the effort people spend working around build inflexibilities in distro-specific scripts would be much better spent improving the programs themselves.
It's usually less work to "fix the program" than work around it. For a few key packages for GoboLinux I even contributed the autoconf scripts, and it was way less work than I thought it'd be. The one thing I like about this approach is that it helps the entire free software community, making for smaller recipes, smaller ebuilds, smaller specs, and so on.
Sure, it ain't revolutionary today, but revolutions don't happen from night to day... they are secretly planned for a long time before the strike.
The filesystem is the package manager
/usr used to stand for "user" in earlier Unix implementations - all "home" directories were under /usr, i.e /usr/joebloggs. A more detailed discussion can be found here.