[ No holy wars, please.  Just because you believe the current thing to
be the one true way doesn't make you right or wrong. ]

    I started rebuilding my universe lately, and wanted to use pkgsrc
to save me some grunt work.  Ran into some issues with my world view
vs pkgsrc's world view.

    Right now, a lot of packages assume that LOCALBASE is a constant
across all builds.  This is reasonable enough, but prevents
configurations that I've been doing for a long time.

    I like to seperate GNU packages into a seperate directory
heirarchy from everything else.  This is my preferred method of
dealing with GNU packages that often overlap system binaries (like
fileutils), instead-of/in-parallel-to the g- prefix that netbsd's
packages use.  Users can readily choose which set of utils they'd like
with a simple twiddling of path ordering, rather than having a large
collection of aliases, or retraining their fingers.


    Not knowing pkgsrc very well, I can't think of a general solution
for the LOCALBASE variability problem.  Removing the assumption is
probably doable, but would take work.

    For this specific case, I could imagine a GNUBASE variable, but
the "what is/isn't GNU" question gets kind of hairy & arbitrary.


    Anyway, I was curious what thoughts on this would be.  I'd be
willing to do work and patches to make my way of thinking work with
pkgsrc.