DPS Initial Ideas

[youshi10 at u.washington.edu]

On Tue, 15 May 2007, Tom Evans wrote:

> On Tue, 2007-05-15 at 11:23 -0400, Mike Meyer wrote:
>> In <861whigyua.fsf at dwp.des.no>, Dag-Erling Smørgrav <des at des.no> typed:
>>> Peter Jeremy <peterjeremy at optushome.com.au> writes:
>>> > Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org> writes:
>>> > [Linux package systems]
>>> > > As far as I know, none of them handle updates from source at all. In
>>> > > fact, dealing with sources seems to be a noticable weakness for them.
>>> > This pretty much rules them out then.
>>> It would, if it were true.  It isn't.
>>
>> Except it is.
>>
>>> apt-get --build source package_name
>>
>> That doesn't update from sources, that just builds a package. You're
>> still stuck updating from packages.
>>
>> Further, like the rpm command, this doesn't deal with dependencies,
>> other than to complain if they aren't met. This means that using it to
>> deal with sources is about as pleasant as using rpm to install binary
>> packages.  Further, there doesn't appear to be anything like make.conf
>> to make it easy to tailor the build process to meet the users
>> requirements.
>>
>> 	<mike
>
> Of course Gentoo does do this [updating from source], being as it is a
> rip-off of freebsd ports. I haven't used it since the (fairly) early
> days when portage was written as a series of bash scripts. I'm fairly
> sure they must have improved it since then - it made portupgrade look
> positively snappy. Unsurprisingly, everything was/is controlled by
> adding options (mainly USE_FLAGS - eg '+gtk2 -kde') to make.conf.
>
> Tom

Tom,
      It's gotten excruciatingly more complex with the introduction of Python, classes, and an increase in USE flags.
-Garrett