[ On Wednesday, October 31, 2001 at 22:12:06 (+0900), sen_ml@eccosys.com wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: testing of software of different versions using pkgsrc (e.g.  Emacs)
>
> From: Alistair Crooks <agc@pkgsrc.org>
> Subject: Re: testing of software of different versions using pkgsrc (e.g. Emacs)
> Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2001 09:32:30 +0100
> > 
> > FYI, I hope to be able to commit something to the tree RSN which
> > will support this, and doesn't require union mounts, so that Solaris,
> > Darwin and Linux users won't lose out. (Darwin seems to lack an
> > /sbin/mount_union command, although it's cross-referenced from
> > mount(8). I think Apple should hire the wonderful Thomas Klausner,
> > who has made such a difference to the NetBSD manual pages).
> 
> This sounds very interesting.  I'm eagerly awaiting ;-)

Indeed it does, and as am I!  ;-)

Will mucking about in bsd.pkg.mk for other reasons I stumbled on the
existance of PKG_DBDIR (I don't know why/how I missed it in reading the
pkg_* manual pages the other day while looking for this feature --
though I was at the time focusing on looking for a command-line
option...).

With care this would allow one to have multiple packages installed in
different PREFIX directories, each with an associated unique PKG_DBDIR
as well.

I don't yet know if this is what you're planning Alistair, but if I were
add support for simultaneously installing multiple variants of packages
then this is the approach I would take.  It would, I believe, neatly
solve the problem of handling dependent packages.  The only thing I
haven't yet come to a conclusion to in my thoughts about this is whether
or not one would create one new PREFIX/PKG_DBDIR pair for each variant
package (and its dependents), or require the user to specify new
locations as desired (or as required when they trip over conflicts).

I'm certainly going to contemplate using the latter scheme to make it
easier to install test packages and perhaps even to begin the effort of
building truly relocatable binary packages.  To that end I'm interested
in discussing how one might better automatically tie the naming of
PKG_DBDIRs to the user-supplied setting of the PREFIX directory.  I'd
like to be able to just change PREFIX and have PKG_DBDIR always be
unique.  In my particular situation this would best be done by simply
moving /var/db/pkg to $PREFIX/var/db/pkg (I always keep a symlink
/usr/var -> /var on the systems where I use PREFIX=/usr).

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

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