Subject: a small proposal for untwisting some of the growing maze of interdependencies
To: NetBSD Packages Technical Discussion List <tech-pkg@NetBSD.ORG>
From: Greg A. Woods <woods@weird.com>
List: tech-pkg
Date: 12/04/2002 19:46:31
Recently some very nice support for internationalization of various
packages has been started in pkgsrc.

Unfortunately it goes a little too far in at least one case:  gmake.

The result is a twisty maze of essentially unnecessary dependencies.

At least it's unnecessary until the day if/when pgksrc itself is fully
internationalized.....

I would like to propose that we have two variants of GNU Make in
pkgsrc.  One used for building other packages, and another for those who
want to install and use a full featured GNU Make for other purposes.

I think anything other build tools used in pkgsrc that currently also
need libiconv and/or libintl should similarly be split into a "pkg"
variant and a normal variant (except those like gtexinfo which need I18N
support in order to build & install packages).

The former would be called something like "pkggmake" (which isn't
pretty, but sounds OK :-), and the latter would remain "gmake" just as
it is today.

This new pkggmake would be built without any I18N/NLS support, i.e. with:

	CONFIGURE_ARGS+=	--without-libintl
	CONFIGURE_ARGS+=	--without-libiconv
	PKGLOCALEDIR=		"@comment "

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;            <g.a.woods@ieee.org>;           <woods@robohack.ca>
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