Re: Off by one in kernel version incompat list for emulators/compatNN pkgs

[David Holland <dholland-pkgtech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Mon, Jan 05, 2009 at 07:27:17AM +0700, Robert Elz wrote:
 > The compatability packages for older versions of NetBSD are all set to
 > not build on a NetBSD that is too old - that's sane, it makes no sense
 > to pretend it is possible to be compatible with NetBSD 4 if you're just
 > running NetBSD 3 (or anything similar).
 > 
 > But (ignoring the NETBSD_COMPAT32 case for now, as I haven't really thought
 > about that one) I think there's an off by one in the ONLY_FOR list
 > in the packages.
 > 
 > That is, taking emulators/compat40 as an example ...
 > [...snip...]

That's a fairly persuasive argument; however, I suspect changing
ONLY_FOR/NOT_FOR/etc. to distinguish build from install is not
trivial. So maybe the best bet is to just allow installing compat
packages on their own system version; in theory it shouldn't do any
harm.

 > I also know that this is going to require some mods to the way the
 > ONLY_FOR (etc) tests are done - we really need to distinguish the
 > systems that can build the package, from those that can install it
 > (which will also most probably be needed as one of the steps towards
 > allowing cross-compiling of the packages where that's possible, so
 > this wouldn't necessarily be a lot of work for little gain.)

I don't think that's true; as things currently work, to cross-compile
you need to be able to install depends, so you need to have
bootstrapped with LOCALBASE and VARBASE (and so forth) pointing
somewhere that packages for the target can be installed. Which means
any package you can build, you can install.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost