On Thu, 18 Feb 1999, Greg A. Woods wrote:

: I've noticed a number of packages have begun using "IGNORE=" to prevent
: their use if they appear to have already been installed in the system.
: 
: Two recent examples are "top" and "gtexinfo".

: So, I'm wondering if this is a good thing to do, and/or if it's even
: necessary.  It seems to me that that this is just a little too much
: local policy to enforce by default, and for no really good reason.

These happen primarily for the duplication factor; bulk pkgsrc builds should
never include something shipped with the OS.

: My thoughts are that if say I'm running NetBSD-1.4 which has top-3.5
: integrated, and top-4.0 comes out and is supported in pkgsrc, I might
: want to install the new top-4.0 as a package, and of course allow my
: users to run which ever version they please by selecting the appropriate
: PATH or whatever.

Whether written or not (and I may check up to find out if it is written
down--if not, it will be), pkgsrc CANNOT install binaries in
${PREFIX}/{s,}bin with the same names as programs with the base system.  
That's one of the pkgsrc prime directives.  This is done so that there's no
$PATH dependency, period.  (Disputes to this policy will be dumped in
/dev/null, as it has been discussed many times over.)

The only real exception is the `cross' pkgs, which offer that as an option
thanks to the difficulty of cross-ifying many build setups; the programs are
not actually installed in ${PREFIX}/bin, but in an arch-specific
subdirectory of ${CROSSBASE}.

: I think the same sort of argument might apply to the NO_PKG_REGISTER=
: and NO_PACKAGE= settings used by things like pkgtools/pkg_install.

This will be handled in a better way in the future.  It currently happens
this way because we don't have real pkgification for the base system ...
yet.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling (Personal tv@pobox.com; Bus. todd_vierling@xn.xerox.com)