On Sun, May 14, 2006 at 06:53:37PM +0300, Aleksey Cheusov wrote:
> 1) IMO this way allows you to _minimally_ depend on system name (uname -s),
> and I think that this may be very important
> for such platforms as Linux which is distributed by
> tens of vendors with very different set of user level tools and
> even libc.
> 2) This was allows you to port pkgsrc to new platforms easier.
> 
> BTW, example above may be adopted to use something like
> PATHS_TO_BE_SEARCHED variable if set (/usr/contrib for Interix
> or /usr/xpg4/bin for Solaris, for example).
> 
> Finally, what do you think about platforms like NetBSD/FreeBSD + GNU-libc
> (promoted by Debian) or OpenSolaris + APT with GNU user tools
> (http://www.gnusolaris.org)?

The reason is simple: because the systems pkgsrc was first ported to
where a lot more coherent than the mess Linux is. To answer the question
about kFreeBSD/kNetBSD from Debian: I don't see the use in them.

Live would be much easier if we can just ignore them or treat them like
a special platform. We don't want to check for every small tool whether
it is reallly POSIX awk, simply because that is *expensive*. It could
perhaps be done during bootstrap, but even then: requirements sometimes
change, e.g. because a new tool is imported.

Even Interix is consistent, I would simply go with LSB for Linux and
ignore everything else.

Joerg