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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."

3 of 366 comments (clear)

  1. I like the concept. by FreeLinux · · Score: 0, Redundant

    I like their Compile concept and I like their descriptive path concept. However, I haven't tried this distibution yet so I can't say whether I like it in practice or not. I have difficulty believing that it would be bad.

  2. usr != user by boredMDer · · Score: 0, Redundant
    Oh and I just love how there is usr/local/sbin, OR usr/sbin, and WHY usr? If 'local' can have 5 letters, would it be so deadly to spell out 'user'?

    Hmm, maybe because 'usr' is an acronym for Unix System Resources, not short for 'user'?

  3. Re:WHAT? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Redundant

    /usr is not short for "User", it's short for "Unix System Resources". The closest thing to a "User" directory is /home, the users' home directories.