[ On Tuesday, September 30, 2003 at 08:43:17 (-0700), Jeremy C. Reed wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Proposal: unification of distfiles for FreeBSD and NetBSD
>
> One reason we can't do this is because the FreeBSD ports and the NetBSD
> pkgsrc are maintained by a variety of volunteers. Using the same distfiles
> in some cases may mean making changes to patches, Makefiles, and also time
> to test and verify that it all works.

Huh?  How do you figure that?  Distfiles come from the third-party
package authors and _MUST_ be identical no matter which packaging system
they're used with!

Furthermore we have distinfo files containing MD5 signatures to ensure
that the fetched distfile is identical to the one the pkgsrc module
expects to work with, no matter which distfile mirror it happens to come
from.

The only thing that could possibly require co-ordination is the naming
of sub-directories used to avoid clashes between distfile names and/or
to provide versioning to distfiles without versioning in their names.
It would seem to me that such co-ordination would be downright trivial
and in reality it's not critical anyway since we're only talking about
mirror archives -- if some disagreement arises then the only fallout
until it's resolved is that the user doing the build has to fetch the
source from the original site, not one of the distfiles mirror sites.

-- 
						Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098                  VE3TCP            RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>          Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>