Re: [gentoo-dev] prefix overide portage

["Bruce A. Locke" <blocke@shivan.org>]

On Tue, 2002-02-19 at 09:13, Matt Doughty wrote:
> Hi,
> I hate to start by complaining or critisizing what I consider a
> wonderful project.  I'm basically a NetBSD user who is looking
> for functionality(hardware 3d support) that linux has, and 
> NetBSD is lacking. I was working through the install, and ran
> into a couple oddities/annoyances.  I noticed that alot of
> packages in portage statically set the install prefix.

Yes alot of packages are setup that way.  I'm of a mixed opinion if
thats a good or a bad thing.  If we do decide to make it more
configurable down the road its going to require alot of ebuild touchups,
etc.  Alot of configure scripts require path information to headers,
assume files are in various locations, etc.  I can tell from experience
if you set a less-then-common prefix many configure scripts are going to
break on you (meaning we'd have to hack on a bunch of them :(

> I find this to be very undesirable behavior, and was wondering if
> this is temporary or has noone complained about this rather
> rigid structure? 

Don't think many people have complained of it yet :)

> From my perspective a system should be divided 
> in this manner:
> 
> base system (kernel, and userland): 	--prefix=/, and --prefix=/usr
> package system installed pkgs:     	--prefix=/usr/pkg
>
> X system:			 	--prefix=/usr/X11R6
> this leaves /usr/local, and /opt for hand built packages. In NetBSD
> the base system is completely seperate from the package system, and
> the package system, and X prefixes can be overridden by the 
> enviroment variables LOCALBASE, and X11BASE respectively. I love 
> the overall design of the system, and clean nature of the /etc
> directory.  I would be happy to help make the needed changes to
> allow for this increased flexibility.

Gentoo makes no distinction between its "core" and packages.  Every part
of the core (kernel, glibc, etc) is treated _exactly_ the same as any
other package.  Portage handles compiling and package manangement
(except for the kernel, you still have to compile that yourself ;)  We
used to split gnome, kde, etc up into /opt/kde, etc but it later became
a mess.

/usr/X11R6 on gentoo is currently only really used by XFree86
packages... All X programs go under /usr not /usr/X11R6.  (We also have
/usr/kde/2 and /usr/kde/3 for kde so users can have the stable kde2
installed while playing with kde 3-cvs).

The only package I'm aware of that touches /usr/local is apache, and
that ebuild is in the process of being rewritten.

/opt is used for those packages which can't be easily made to fit within
a FHS compliant file system.  For instance java packages are not
designed to be installed in /usr/bin, etc without alot of hassle...

 
> --Matt
> _______________________________________________
> gentoo-dev mailing list
> gentoo-dev@gentoo.org
> http://lists.gentoo.org/mailman/listinfo/gentoo-dev
> 
-- 

Bruce A. Locke
blocke@shivan.org