On Sun, Oct 03, 2004 at 03:37:02AM +0000, Johnny C. Lam wrote:
> I think we should fix up pkgsrc to allow subdirectories of arbitrary
> depth containing packages within each category.  Then you could do
> something like:
> 
>     devel
>      |-- GConf
>      |    |-- GConf-1.x
>      |    `-- GConf-2.x
>      |-- automake
>      |    |-- automake-1.4.x
>      |    |-- automake-1.7.x
>      |    `-- automake-1.9.x
>      |-- cdk
>      |-- cvs
>      `-- glib
>           |-- glib-1.x
>           `-- glib-2.x
>
> We would need to hash out the proper way to name package directories,
> where I think we want to the somehow encode the "major" version number
> as you noted above.  I offer no plan for transitioning to such a
> structure, and clearly there are several other problems that would
> need to be solved, e.g. locations for buildlink3.mk files, how to
> write dependencies in a package Makefile, etc., but it would be nice
> to figure out what we would like in an ideal world, and then figure
> out how much work it would be to make it come true.

This is a nice idea - we have long put off the prospect of moving to
subordinate directories, and probably with good reason - there is a
certain amount of logic that presupposes a rigid category/package
structure.

One thing that we could look at doing is to have a parent directory
"Makefile.inc"-style file, similar to those in src/, which would
provide a common way of defining _PKGSRCDIR, and include bsd.pkg.mk
appropriately.

I think this might make pkglocate redundant, but the web interface at

	http://pkgsrc.netbsd.se/

is much nicer and much more useful.
 
Regards,
Alistair