Jan-Hinrich,

> In message <645jf1$pog@rrzs3.uni-regensburg.de>you write:
> > until 1.3 then, though. Anyone volunteering to get teTeX 
> > working? Please contact me if you got it running! :-)
> 
> oskar@zippo (1) > which latex
> /usr/local/bin/latex
> oskar@zippo (2) > ls -l /usr/local/bin/latex
> lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  34 Nov 26  1996 /usr/local/bin/latex -> 
> ../teTeX/bin/i386-netbsd1.2B/latex
> 
> Uhm, worked out of the box.  Now, how to construct a package for that?  

Take a look at the (admittedly rudimentary) package system documentation:

	http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/netbsd/Packages.txt
	
> I personally do not like that most out-of-the-box compiles are patched by the 
> package tools just to get the nondefault (for the rest of the world) prefix 
> right.  This should be handled by a configure run with appropriate --prefix 
> during make.

For GNU autoconf-based packages, a --prefix argument is handed to the
configure script.  See around line 745 of /usr/share/mk/bsd.port.mk:

.if defined(GNU_CONFIGURE)
CONFIGURE_ARGS+=        --prefix=${PREFIX}
HAS_CONFIGURE=          yes
.endif

Other configure scripts may or may not handle a --prefix argument, and
so it's not always appropriate to give the script that argument. In
general, I'd have to say that we try to minimise the number of packages
that do the patching-just-to-get-the-prefix-right, and only do that as a
last resort. I'd disagree that it's "most out-of-the-box compiles"...

Alistair