Re: [gentoo-user] why multiple versions of java-config, automake, and autoconf?

[Enrico Weigelt <weigelt@metux.de>]

* Kent Fredric <kentfredric@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 6/9/07, Enrico Weigelt <weigelt@metux.de> wrote:
> >
> >What flexibility do I take away exactly ?
> >And what exactly gets harder ?
> >
> 
> Automated building of dependant packages

More precisely ? 
AFAICS it would be much easier w/o slots.

I already mentioned "Briegel". Here I'm strictly doing as described.
This works great. The only reason for using Gentoo is that it has
much, much more manpower than me alone. For most common systems 
Gentoo is quite good, for embedded targets (where I've got relatively
few packages) I'm using Briegel.

> Gentoo has a collection of magic script that do make this nice for us.

Which ones for example ? / What exactly do they do ? 
Would that magic be necessary with my approach ?

> ie ( last I looked anyway ) java-config and autoconf were not binarys,
> but scripts which pointed to the correct binary given the right
> environment variables.
> 
> This makes the building of other packages that were invented upstream
> without predicting changes in autoconf easier to maintain, instead of
> having to send out a new patch every time upstream releases a
> non-compatible-with-new-autoconfs version /just/ to make it work, we
> just set WANT_AUTOCONF=1.4 in the environment and the appropriate
> autoconf gets run, which seeems a fairly reasonable thing to do. (
> otherwise the concept we have today known as a version bump would be a
> whole deal harder more often)

Yeah. Wrapper scripts. I also have such things @ Briegel. 
Please explain why this is an reasonable argument in the question 
whether or whether not to do slotting ?

> I remeber the days of Java1.4 -> Java1.5 migration headaches before
> they slotted it and created java-confing system to get around it, 

Would it make a difference if sun-java-1.5 would have got it's own
package name (distinct from -1.4) ?

AFAIK -1.4 and -1.5 are really incompatible, almost as much as 
gtk-1.x vs. gtk-2.x. So why not treating them as different packages ?

> As for gtk2-0.1 vs gtk-2.0.1, the latter is clearly a more logical
> version number.

Why not gtk2-2.0.1 ?

> if it was called gtk2 instead of gtk-2, it would need a separate
> folder, and a completely different set of configs,

Yes, of course - it's an different package.

> it was bad enough when php4 & php5 were different applications. 

Why ? 
php4 and php5 are very incompatible, almost as much as it had been
with php3. This already had been clear when php5 was at alpha. 
I never ever expected them to be the same package.

Of course evrything would be much clearer if there was an big 
consensous on naming the scripts with *.php4 and *.php3 as it 
had been done in history w/ php3. But this really has nothing to 
do with slotting vs. separate packages.


cu
-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------------
 Enrico Weigelt    ==   metux IT service - http://www.metux.de/
---------------------------------------------------------------------
 Please visit the OpenSource QM Taskforce:
 	http://wiki.metux.de/public/OpenSource_QM_Taskforce
 Patches / Fixes for a lot dozens of packages in dozens of versions:
	http://patches.metux.de/
---------------------------------------------------------------------
-- 
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list