Brook Milligan <brook%nmsu.edu@localhost> writes: > What is the established art for differentiating among Linux systems in > cases like this? Or should we just use ncurses on Linux generally and > not try to differentiate among systems? As Edgar asked, how do we > reliably distinguish Linux userland given the information generally > available to pkgsrc, i.e., MACHINE_PLATFORM, OS_VARIANT, etc.? I would say that either: We use OS_VARIANT to define what we'd normally call an OS, where we can rely on how things are laid out, or We write something like autoconf to find things at bootstrap time, decide if they are good enough, and set things up baseed on that. The second one seems like way too much work. So overall I think it's best not to think of "Linux" as an operating system. Besides the valid but slightly pedantic point that it's a kernel (only slightly because some people who use the term are actually fuzzy on the distinction), and the RMS point that it should be called GNU/Linux, really most people mean by Linux a related group of operating systems. Which is a long way of saying I think pkgsrc should deal with names for Linux distribution families, and I think that's what OS_VARIANT is for. If there is variance within OS_VARIANT, we probably need to make more names within that.
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