Re: pkgsrc on alpine linux (non-gnu userland) - trip report

[Ottavio Caruso <ottavio2006-usenet2012%yahoo.com@localhost>]

On Thu, 28 May 2020 at 15:46, nia <nia%netbsd.org@localhost> wrote:
>
> recently set up an alpine linux in nvmm for cross compiling compilers for
> netbsd/amd64. decided to test pkgsrc on it.
>
> bootstrapping is fine (hooray).
>
> installing packages revealed problems.
>
> - platform tools for linux expects /bin/bash. there's no such thing.
>   making that conditional helped.
>
> - then, there's a dependency loop on flex as a dependency for bison
>   as a dependency for bash. i just installed bison from alpine packages,
>   that helped. i suspect not having flex violates long held expectations
>   so i won't demand that be fixed.
>
> - xz from busybox isn't good enough to build gettext-tools.
>   it needs -5, xz from busybox doesn't have -5.
>   TOOLS_PLATFORM.xz=/usr/pkg/bin/xz in mk.conf helped.
>
> - i was able to build rust-bin because it explicitly uses
>   the musl bins if glibc isn't detected. lang/rust should
>   probably do the same.
>
> since linux userlands are far from predictable these days,
> it might make sense to only define tools for linux that
> are actually in POSIX, unless we can actually detect busybox etc.
>
> thoughts?

Alpine Linux seems to deliberately break with many Linux conventions,
so my humble opinion is that it is not really a benchmark for what the
average Linux echo system is.

-- 
Ottavio Caruso