On Wed, Oct 05, 2005 at 11:31:32PM +0100, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> On Wed, 5 Oct 2005 16:13:06 -0500 Brian Harring <ferringb@gentoo.org>
> wrote:
> | A) would like to hear what you think is required planning wise 
> | compared to the previous haubi prototype patch.
> 
> There has been no serious discussion on how *ebuilds* will use the
> prefix system. Hacking econf and expecting PREFIX to be sufficient is
> naive from a tree-perspective.

econf isn't the only change required; the point is that whatever is 
decided, would have to be added to econf thus covering a good chunk of 
ebuilds in the tree that don't require fancy voodoo.

The basic proposal of haubi's glep (ignoring the portage innard 
modifications) came down to addition of a prefix var, that would be 
required slipped in for any fs installation paths (--prefix=$PREFX 
fex).

Beyond that, there is the shebang issue which can be addresses via a 
combination of automated scans/fixes, and fixing bugs as it's hit.  
Hardcoded vars in scripts for the path to a binary are an issue also, 
although again, scans can be done to at least check for it.

Leaves mangling the build process so that the build framework of the 
package uses the prefix offset files, rather then / .  For c/c++ 
source, usual trick from fink afaik involves a mangling of cflags with 
-I tacked in.  Kinda ugly, although I'd expect there is a better 
route.

Packages that pull include/compile settings/args from a utility 
(thinking python configuration tools, and pkgconfig) shouldn't be too 
horrid to change, since it's a matter of modifying it in one place 
(theoretically :).
~harring