Re: [gentoo-dev] prefix overide portage

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

On Tue, 2002-02-19 at 23:38, Dave Lee wrote:

> I don't think this would actually be "hacking", I would call it something
> much nicer, like cleaning up.

Hacking as in trying to "hack around in" an autogenerated script that
quite frankly wasn't meant for humans to edit it, or having to
autogenerate our own configure scripts using a system few people really
understand :)

I do think "hacking" is the correct term here ;)

> I can see the desire to set a custom
> install prefix, and I think that making the ebuild scripts more flexible
> to allow for this may prove useful in that it will make the portage system
> much more flexible and customizable.  It should't be too much effort to
> let loose some scripts on the portage tree to fix --preifx=/usr to
> --preifx=$SOME_PREFIX_VAR where the SOME_PREFIX_VAR can be set in 
> /etc/make.conf.  In another thread Vitaly Kushneriuk said "the Gentoo way 
> is to provide user with the maximum control that is practical" and I dont
> think having a custom prefix would be impractical.  Anyway, just my
> thoughts on the subject.  One thing to note is that I noticed the ebuild
> system is "rigid" like this in more ways than just preifx, every other
> configure variable is hardcoded by the ebuild author into the ebuild file,
> like mandir and others.  In rpm systems, when you create an rpm spec, you
> can use %{_prefix} and %{_mandir} when you build rpms, and that gives it
> some flexibility.

Agreed, it would be a nice addition.  It would help if someone
associated with portage would add relavent support to portage or at
least set an example as a standard.  This means we could make sure all
new packages follow it and we can phase it into older packages over time
as we update them for other reasons.

-- 

Bruce A. Locke
blocke@shivan.org