Alistair Crooks wrote:
On Sat, Jan 05, 2008 at 11:10:18AM +0000, Roland Illig wrote:Module Name: pkgsrc Committed By: rillig Date: Sat Jan 5 11:10:18 UTC 2008 Modified Files: pkgsrc/devel/scmgit: Makefile Log Message: It's a META_PACKAGE.The danger of having a separate definition in the Makefile for each pkgsrc entry is that, over time, these things stagnate. Firstly, I have to ask, what's the reason for marking these packages as being meta-packages? Nothing should care whether it installs files or not.
Have you looked at the patch? META_PACKAGE is a short-cut for PKG_DESTDIR_SUPPORT=user-destdir, DISTFILES=#none, PLIST_SRC=#none, NO_CHECKSUM=yes, NO_CONFIGURE=yes, NO_BUILD=yes, do-install:, do-patch:. Isn't that worth a new variable?
And secondly, if there is a good reason, there must be ways to recognise these packages automatically - the existence of DEPENDS and a zero length PLIST, for example. Or a combination of that and no DISTFILES.
That's a fine idea. There may be cases where a pkgsrc user accidentally deletect a PLIST file, and I don't want a package to be a meta-package in this case. So let's invent a new variable META_PACKAGE as a short-cut for all this, so that we can check whether the missing PLIST is intentional or not.
I think we need to make the pkgsrc Makefiles simpler for people to create and parse.
$ cvs rdiff -r1.23 -r1.24 pkgsrc/devel/scmgit/Makefile \ | grep @@ @@ -1,11 +1,9 @@ @@ -13,13 +11,6 @@ I think saving 9 lines makes the files simpler.
(which is why I think the AUTO_DIRS is better than what we had previously, so thanks for that. OTOH, that's another variable that should be set automatically, when user-destdir is specified).
Ewww, when these two things are combined, it will set free a lot of energy. DESTDIR is from Joerg, and he dislikes AUTO_MKDIRS. ;)
Roland