Re: gnu packaging ideas

[Luis Araujo]

Alfred M. Szmidt wrote:
>    Sorry (again) for the lag O:)
> 
> I prefer very late than never. :-)
> 
>    > Sounds good, though the format of each sexp (specially the
>    > dependency stuff) needs to be pondered about.  I think that much
>    > of this data can be grabbed from the Free Software Directory.
> 
>    Yup, having an easy to grab all this info will make a database easy
>    to be generated. We must discuss about the format itself. SEXPs,
>    Double dot separated values, etc.. any proposal? idea?
> 
> I prefer sexp's since it allows us to do crazy things, if we want to.
> Double dot seperate values, etc don't.
> 

I also think that we should use SEXP's.

> 
>    >    In metadata we could store install/deinstall scripts.
>    > 
>    > A package must work without these.  Simply extracting the package
>    > to /stow should be enough.
> 
>    I think having pre/post install scripts would be pretty nice.
> 
> We all agreed that they should be avoided at all costs.  There are
> several issues with them, for one, what happens if you have a pre/post
> install/deinstall script that _must_ be ran for the package to be
> successfully installed?  Then a simple `tar -C /stow -xzvf
> package.tgz' won't work, which is how the package manager works.  If
> we, in the future, come to a point where we really really need
> pre/post install/deinstall scripts, then we can add such a thing.  But
> I have looked and I cannot see any reason why any package really needs
> it, one can work around what is done in the pre/post install/deinstall
> script by other means.
> 
> 

Yes, please, let's _try_ to avoid the pre/post install/deinstall scripts
at all cost. They tend to create too many inconsistencies and weird
behaviours.

Who is woking on this SEXP package manager thing?

Regards,