Re: [gentoo-user] Re: Shared libraries in Gentoo

[Enrico Weigelt <weigelt@metux.de>]

* Al <oss.elmar@googlemail.com> wrote:

> I think there is a future for second level managers that can be
> installed into multiple OS and yet set up the very same POSIX
> invironement. Having that you can build complex software that is
> portable. 

IMHO the most work intensive stuff (on per-package basis) is all
the QM. Parts of it can be done generically, assisted by automatic
massbuilds and various auto-test mathods (some of them already
built into portage), but still leaving much target or even install
specific stuff (eg. will some package foo work properly with 
certain cflags and libc-version X ?).

> You don't depend on Java. You don't need to run a virtual server.

You never really needed Java, but proper build systems. What we 
could gain here is saving a lot of distro-specific extra works if
some distro like Gentoo directly works on different targets
environments.

The interesting point in Java is that it is an (well, was) an 
very cleanly defined virtual machine (even virtual processor)
environment which can be emulated on virtually any known machine
(assuming it has enough resources). That could also work with
plain C, if the basic APIs are stricly and cleanly defined.
(see Plan9 vs. plan9port).

> Currently there are two canditates. One candidate is Cygwin Ports, the
> other one is Gentoo Prefix. Cygwin Ports just added cross-compilation
> features into the latest edition. Still Cygwin is limited to Windows.

Let me add a third candidate: Briegel. It's based on crosscompiling
from ground up. It's not really a distro, but more a generic build
system, as a basic building block for distro generation. But beware
that it's based on very different concepts than traditional distro
build systems.


cu
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