G'day,

Initially, I've started out porting rrdtool utilizing the libraries as
supplied with the package. My consequent initial submission was
knocked back because it was felt that it would be better to use
NetBSD's own ports of these libraries.

I've consequently disected rrdtool in view to utilize NetBSD's own
ports of the required libraries. This neccesitated an additional port
of cgilib and some changes to the code to accommodate the current
version of gd as it nolonger supports the gif format due to licensing
problems with the compressiong alogarithm within gif.

Finally, with a lot of help from Lex, the final package was
submitted. After this experience, I've decided that I won't track
rrdtool with each minor release. Well, this was my first undertaking
of a more complex package which gave me something to think about... ;-)

I've since received patches for rrdtool-1.0.10 from Jeff Rizzo
and welcome Chris' suggestion of changing /usr/pkg to ${PREFIX}. What I
don't like is the idea to rollback rrdtool to use the libraries
supplied with the package. I rather like to see the author of
rrdtool to modify the autoconf utilities to check whether a required
library already exists on the system and if not than use the the libs
supplied. Frankly, I don't believe this will happen. 

Your comments are most welcome.

cheerio Berndt

Greg A. Woods wrote
> [ On , February 18, 2000 at 14:32:43 (-0700), Chris Jones wrote: ]
> > Subject: fix for databases/rrdtool
> >
> > Is there any reason I shouldn't commit this as patch-ah for rrdtool?
> > It changes many occurrences of "/usr/pkg" to "${PREFIX}".
> 
> I really don't think it's necessary to make packages interdependent
> unnecessarily.  I've been using rrdtool (1.0.13) happily and
> successfully without using the latest/greatest versions of the libraries
> it uses but rather simply using what came with rrdtool.
> 
> It gets to be a royal pain in the butt when too many low-level libraries
> (such as gd) are shared amongst many packages.  (This is yet another
> reason why shared libraries, especially when used outside of the OS
> utilities themselves, are more trouble than they are worth in most
> circumstances these days!)  That goes double when you're using binary
> packages!  Obviously one should just stick with exactly what's shipped
> with the release to avoid this pain, but unfortunately that would make
> NetBSD's pkgsrc almost totally useless in the real world for production
> systems!  :-)
> 
> On a more philosophical note I would also argue that one should not
> arbitrarily replace components of an application, especially when the
> application's author has gone to the trouble to directly integrate the
> component parts into his distributed source tree.  It's one thing when
> the author says something like "Before you install this pacakge you'll
> need to install any version of blah, blarg-v2 or newer, foo-v1.3, and
> bipity-v3 with the enclosed patch for it" and quite another when the
> exact versions the application was developed and tested with are
> supplied.  I didn't do any comparisons of the sources included with
> rrdtool to see if they are virgin or not, but that's hardly the point --
> a bug fix in a component can just as easily cause a new bug in the
> application even if the compilation and link goes just fine.  Now I'm
> not suggesting that rrdtool in this particular case wasn't well tested
> with the new libraries....
> 
> Coming back to the real world for another generalisation I might also
> point out that simply pkg-ising rrdtool with the stuff it comes with is
> enormously easier than all the goop required to undo the author's
> efforts.
> 
> Which reminds me -- I keep wanting to cook up a scheme where package
> builds can in a sight-dependent manner partly ignore overly dependent
> use of shared libraries from other packages (using system libraries is
> OK, but libgd.so is right out in my books!)....
> 
> -- 
> 							Greg A. Woods
> 
> +1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
> Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>
> 


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