[gentoo-dev] ebuild vs makefile

[gentoo-dev] ebuild vs makefile

[Jeff Kowing]

I have a question concerning when should building/installation
commands go directly into an ebuild vs. when should it be put into a
Makefile (using a patch if a Makefile for the package already exists).

The question comes up because I've been trying to create an ebuild for
xmlto (a very nice frontend wrapper tool to simplify processing
docbook to pdf,html,ps).  This got me looking at the passivetex-1.4
ebuild which creates a Makefile (there is no Makefile with the
passivetex distribution) to do creation of directories and simple
copying of source files to the destination.  The Makefile contains
'mkdir' and 'cp' like commands that I would have normally thought
would best go directly into the ebuild itself.

On the otherhand, by creating/patching the Makefile, I can see that it
might have the benefit of going back upstream to the creator of the
package itself which would simplify creating an ebuild/deb/rpm for all
distributions for later releases.

Anyways, I wondered if some of the ebuild gurus would share their
thoughts or general rules of thumb for when to do it in the ebuild
vs. when to do it by patching or creating a Makefile.

Thanks.

By the way, I mention the passivetex ebuild only to give a concrete
example.  I am very grateful to the passivetex ebuild creators and
thank them for their contribution!

-- 
Jeff Kowing
jeffrey.d.kowing@nasa.gov

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