On Sun, 10 Dec 2000, Frederick Bruckman wrote:

: > Although, I must admit that I *am* considering nuking the pathname
: > translation side of things. For folks upgrading, we can provide a
: > pre-compiled compatibility ld.so which looks up a.out shared libs in
: > something other than /usr/lib. The i386 port has already set a precedent
: > for this...
:
: It's not i386 dependent. Your procedure would be better if it *moved*
: the shared libraries to under /emul/aout, instead of copying them.
: That way, ldconfig's cache would have the libraries under /emul/aout
: in the first place, and you would't have to re-run "ldconfig"
: everytime you overwrote an aout shared library with an ELF one.

I've yet to see a clean /usr/pkg solution that doesn't involve switching
over all pkgs in one system-downtime sweep.

If the layer is for compatibility, it should either do the same pathname
translation as COMPAT_AOUT (which, I can demonstrate for the fourth time,
has real applied use), or offer that as a kernel option.  I have a feeling
I'll want that pathname translation once mac68k goes ELF, as I've just
installed 1.5 on one.

: Nuking the pathname translation would be good, IMO. While we're on the
: subject, there was some discussion on moving the aout libs somewhere
: else besides /emul/aout. FreeBSD evidently uses /usr/lib/compat/aout.

This is fine.

: I have some thoughts on the compat packages, too. It would be ideal if
: there were *one* compat package that supported every previous system,
: versioned the same as the latest base system it supports.

This is not necessary; the split style allows for less diskspace usage and
somewhat more clean bundling of the libraries.  ("Why add 1.2 and 1.3 stuff
when you only need 1.4 compat?")  I am considering making the distfile for
these pkgs be a base.tgz from the NetBSD archives--similar to what my
pending FreeBSD compat pkgs do, by downloading the bin.* files and
extracting those.  The package binary tarball should be the "easy" way to
install these, with pkg_add.

Note that I still have pending a task to make the compat14 pkgs.  I do
intend to complete this shortly.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv@wasabisystems.com>  *  http://www.wasabisystems.com/
-- Speed, stability, security, and support.  Wasabi NetBSD:  Run with it.