Re: X11 article, for review
Re: X11 article, for review
- Subject: Re: X11 article, for review
- From: "Volker A. Brandt" <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 20:49:28 +0200
Hello all,
Sao X writes:
> > o the fink people force you to adopt a non-standard path (/sw) with
> > no chance of changing it to something sensible (e.g. /opt/local,
> > /usr/local or whatever)
>
> No need, it's very well explained at the Fink FAQ here:
>
> http://fink.sourceforge.net/faq/general.php#usr-local
Hmmm, there is no explanation how to avoid /sw. There is a statement
that it is possible, and the installation process will warn about it.
However, I heard that /sw is hardcoded in several scripts/packages
whatever and that one should not seriously consider changing it.
> >From my experience, most Macintosh beginners don't mind at all that Fink
> installs everything in /sw.
I am not a beginner. I am a Unix consultant. I do mind. I haven't
said that it's not good for beginners. I just said that I dislike
being forced to use /sw.
Tim Cutts writes:
> This means I can bung anything I like in /opt or /usr/local without
> worrying about it trampling on fink.
>
> This is a Good Thing, at least in my opinion.
True. If your setup is: /sw for the stable stuff you need to use,
/opt (or whatever) for playing around, then it is good indeed.
My setup is different. I have a staging and packaging area somewhere,
then packages drop into /opt and *work*. I do that on Solaris,
I do that on NetBSD. I want to do that on Mac OS X. That means
no fink but lots of duplicated work for me, because fink give me no
choice.
Also, I dislike having billions of entries in my $PATH. Since I use
my home directory across several architectures, I have a number
of parameterised directories in there already (~/bin.$osname-$cpuname,
~/bin.$osname, ~/bin.$cpuname, etc.).
> This is a shame, since the Debian system on which it is based is very
> good for this; you can download a tarball and a compressed diff file
> required to debianize it.
I have to look into this, it is quite near the top of my "interesting"
list. :-)
Michhle Garoche writes:
> First, you can change the default location if you download the sources
> via cvs, even put them on an external disk (I don't say that from
> rumors, I did it on a Mac whose hard drive was too small).
That sounds good, but will all binary packages still work?
> > o they make it very hard to find the patches used to compile
> > open source packages for fink, thus making it impossible to
> > reuse the hard work the many good contributors to fink did
> Again, if you use the cvs mechanism, the patches are all grouped
> together in well-known locations, you can access them, change them as
> you like, recompile and so on and even put the sources in non standard
That sounds even better. Another friendly list owner also pointed
this out in private email. However, this is only somewhat semi-
documented on the fink web site. :-)
I tried to check out the fink project from CVS, but the packages
directory is empty. Still, the patches are clickable under
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/fink/packages/, so
I must be doing something wrong. Most of the other subdirectories
do have contents.
Anyway, this is not the forum to discuss fink details. Still, thanks
for all the replies (I haven't added any individual CCs).
Regards -- Volker
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Volker A. Brandt Consulting and Support for Sun Solaris
Brandt & Brandt Computer GmbH WWW: http://www.bb-c.de/~vab/
Meckenheim, Germany Email: email@hidden
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