[ On Thursday, March 20, 2003 at 19:42:43 (-0500), gabriel rosenkoetter wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: why separate system and pkg hierarchies? (was: /usr/pkg/etc/rc.d/*)
>
> On Thu, Mar 20, 2003 at 01:49:09PM -0500, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> > Well, those packages are effectively broken then, especially if the
> > clashing files are ones in a "bin" (i.e. $PATH) directory.
> 
> Okay, what about pkgsrc/print/{lprng,cups}?
> 
> Suppose, for whatever reason, I want those running on my system for
> users, but still want NetBSD lp{,r,q,rm} in the usual places? Or,
> suppose I want *both* packages?

What you're saying is really logically no different than if there were
also "bsdlpd" package and you want to have it installed in parallel with
CUPS and LPrng.  Indeed for some things (maybe not CUPS and LPrng, but
certainly anything with alternate implementations which is not, or
cannot be, "wrapperized") this may be exactly what you're faced with
when the full system is "packaged", assuming it is done with sufficient
granularity.

If you want to simultaneously insall all packages representing variant
implementations of a given functionality, and you want them all to be
equally useful to your users then you have to ensure they can all be
installed with unique filenames in any $PATH referenced directories
(because depending upon the order of directories in a user's $PATH just
to deal with variant implementations is quite bogus) so you may as well
do it right in the first place just make sure all their pathnames (sans
$PREFIX) are unique.  That way it doesn't matter if they're all
installed in the same $PREFIX or not.

The GNU packages do that now with --program-prefix or some such (and
other rules about how autoconf and automake work together so that
multiple versions of the very same package can be simultaneously
installed).  I don't see any reason why CUPS shouldn't and can't be
treated similarly.

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

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