Subject: Re: A couple of package issues
To: John Darrow <John.P.Darrow@wheaton.edu>
From: Johnny C. Lam <lamj@stat.cmu.edu>
List: tech-pkg
Date: 06/19/2001 21:37:16
John Darrow <John.P.Darrow@wheaton.edu> writes:
> 
> The easiest solution I could see to this would be to simply rename the
> netscape 3 script to 'netscape3'.  If this would be okay, I'll go
> ahead with the send-pr with just this.  (Whether or not the other
> files installed by this package really belong in share or not, I think
> that with the age of the netscape in question, it's not worth moving
> them...)

Sounds good to me ... Just Do It.

> My question is, is there already a game which has the "definitive" way
> to set up a scorefile?  If not, I'd propose something similar to the
> way used for modifiable files by (e.g.) mail/imp:
> 
> INSTALL script looks to see if a scorefile is already present, and, if
> not, creates it.
> 
> DEINSTALL script looks to see if the scorefile has changed from the
> default (for many cases, the default would be zero-length, so this
> would be easy, others might require some sort of .dist file on a
> case-by-case basis), if not, deletes the scorefile, otherwise prints a
> message indicating the user should delete it if it is no longer
> needed.

This sounds like a good way to handle it.  I know some packages do
some exec/unexec magic in the PLIST, but I style-wise, I prefer to
separate out this kind of stuff into the INSTALL/DEINSTALL scripts as
the PLIST then just contains a list of files.

> This should hopefully allow package version updates (if the scorefile
> format hasn't changed), without cluttering up systems where the
> scorefile is never used (such as the build system).

Excellent, and it also preserves the score file if it's changed.

> I'd like to get comments soon (even if just a "sounds good, go ahead"
> or a "no, don't do that, do it this way") because I'd like to finish
> clearing out this batch of patches so that I can update and do another
> bulk build with the buildlink.mk changes...

The buildlink.mk changes are hardly pervasive, but I'm working on it.
You'd do better to wait a week or two if you really want to exercise
the buildlink.mk stuff.

	Cheers,

     -- Johnny C. Lam <lamj@stat.cmu.edu>
        Department of Statistics, Carnegie Mellon University
        http://www.stat.cmu.edu/~lamj/