[haiku-development] Re: Removing /boot/common
- From: Ingo Weinhold <ingo_weinhold@xxxxxx>
- To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 06 Oct 2013 16:39:19 +0200
On 10/06/2013 12:25 PM, Axel Dörfler wrote:
On 09/22/2013 12:31 PM, Ingo Weinhold wrote:
> Since there can be certain dependencies between packages (e.g.
> relative symbolic links or built-in relative paths) -- usually in
> case when software belonging to a single port is broken up into
> different packages (e.g. there are 6 git packages) -- certain
> packages must be installed in the same location as other packages.
Do you have some striking examples for that? At least it sounds to me
like a "fix the damn software" kind of problem. Can you help with that?
Well, actually git (and other software) does it kind of the right way.
It usually sucks when software hard-codes their installation paths at
compile time, since then it can only be installed there and cannot be
moved anywhere else. We solved that problem (well, mostly solved it) by
using the package links indirection, so a package works in any
installation location.
The various git components only use relative paths to refer to each
other (or probably, rather to the core components), so git can be
installed anywhere. While this is nice, breaking git up into different
packages means they have to be installed in the same installation
location or otherwise won't find the files they depend on.
I'm sure this can be "fixed" by hard-coding absolute paths. I have no
clue how much work that would be. Given that until recently we hadn't
even managed to move the configuration file from $HOME to the settings
directory (and apparently I even messed that up (cf. #10030 [1])), I
don't think it is advisable to do anything that requires this kind of
changes. It's also something that very likely cannot be upstreamed, i.e.
has to be maintained forever.
In case that wasn't clear yet, package maintenance is a huge amount of
work. I would say most of the time of our contracts (or at least a major
part of it) Oliver and I worked on packages. Only the packages needed
for the release builds. And most of them are nowhere near "perfect" yet.
So I'd be very careful with any feature that requires additional changes
in ported software.
CU, Ingo
[1] http://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/10030
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