Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 22, 2007 at 02:39:20PM -0400, Johnny C. Lam wrote:
>> The former is less extensible, but requires no changes to the
>> infrastructure itself.  The latter is definitely more expressive, but
>> ultimate would involve modifying the infrastructure quite a bit, and
>> would make pkgsrc a little slower when running depends phase.
> 
> I don't like to make the tools framework too extensible. No fine grained
> versions in it please. I would also recomment complaining to the authors
> in this case, but that's a different question.
> 
>> Along those lines, we could also add things like ggrep, gfind, gxargs,
>> etc. for the GNU versions of those programs.
> 
> Why? I don't think they offer much value and we do use the replacements
> on platforms with too limited versions already, don't we?

I was recently discussing an issue with devel/cogito with another 
developer where the scripts installed by the package depended upon GNU 
features of grep, find and xargs.  This was difficult to express using 
the tools framework because the tools framework is most useful in 
describing what's needed by pkgsrc itself, not what the packages need at 
run-time.  Now, pkgsrc itself doesn't need any GNU features; however, 
the packages themselves sometimes do.  I don't mind submitting patches 
back to the authors to remove the use of GNUisms, but sometimes as a 
package maintainer, it's just easier not to resist the tide.

	Cheers,

	-- Johnny Lam <jlam@pkgsrc.org>