Re: Retreive installed gnustep version

[David Chisnall]

On 10 Nov 2013, at 22:54, Riccardo Mottola <riccardo.mottola@libero.it> wrote:

>> Applications in Debian packages do need to be broken up for consistency
>> with the rest of the system. Even if looking at single package such as
>> ViewPDF makes one wonder what sense it makes, in the big picture, it's
>> better.
> I strongly disagree. It breaks the GNUstep experience.

I also agree with Riccardo here.  The FreeBSD packages use the GNUstep layout 
and put the root in /usr/local/GNUstep.  For people who are interested in 
GNUstep and its decisions, they get the tree (I typically symlink 
/usr/local/GNUstep/* to /, so I get /System and so on), for everyone else 
there's just a GNUstep directory hidden away somewhere and they don't have to 
care about it - the libraries are linked into /usr/local/lib and applications 
install a tiny wrapper script for launching (we don't seem to be installing 
.desktop files for most things yet - that's something on my to-test list).

> Also, a user may have the right to install an app from source, along side 
> debian packages. His installed app will be a bundle, making a pretty big mess.

This shouldn't be true, if they install -make from the packages too.  In the 
FreeBSD case, if you install the core GNUstep packages from, uh, packages, then 
you will be able to compile things with the same compile flags and so on that 
we do - the other packages are all built using the gnustep-make package.

As a somewhat related question, I am pondering whether it makes sense for 
FreeBSD to switch to installing all packaged applications in the System domain, 
so that Local is free for installed-from-source things, and it becomes trivial 
to revert to the system-provided stuff by just blowing away the Local domain.

David



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