* On 2026-08-30 at 19:30 BST, Greg Troxel wrote:
Thomas Klausner <wiz%netbsd.org@localhost> writes:Yes, pbulk is broken the same way, but should we change the infrastructure to make it easier for packagers or keep going with these weird patterns?I lean to fix the tools so that relative refs in packages work like you'd think. Either that or we need to document that it doesn't and have pkglint warn. But I find "../../category/package" to be natural, and it's how we include bl3 files. Having a rule that some uses of that pattern need a curdir prefix seems very strange, from the point of view of writing/editing Makefiles.
I'd prefer to not encode relative paths in metadata, I just think it's far too loose, and really don't like the 'cd' requirement because it might not always be suitable (e.g. if a tool such as lintpkgsrc wants to operate on multiple packages simultaneously for any reason).
I do think it'd be useful though for bsd.pkg.mk to normalise the paths so that you could write "../../foo/bar" in Makefile and the correct absolute path is returned. I think this would be reasonably straight-forward, and have the added benefit of cleaning up some paths being /pkgsrc/cat/pkg and some being /pkgsrc/../../cat/pkg
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