Re: New bc

[Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost>]

Gavin Howard <gavin.d.howard%gmail.com@localhost> writes:

> On Fri, Apr 19, 2019 at 8:47 AM Greg Troxel <gdt%lexort.com@localhost> wrote:
>>
>> Gavin Howard <gavin.d.howard%gmail.com@localhost> writes:
>>
>> > Would there be interest in adding my bc as a port?
>>
>> We call them packages (vs the FreeBSD term port; here port means cpu
>> typ), but that's not important.
>
> Oh, whoops. I have been working with FreeBSD and got mixed up. My bad.

No problem, and you are not the first!  It's an unfortunate historical
accident.

I'll write to you offline about wip access.

> I named it "bc" so that people would know that it is, in fact, a bc.
> However, in the Linux distros and other *BSD's, my bc is named
> differently, which is possible because the build system accepts both a
> prefix and a suffix to add to the executable name.
>
> For example, OpenBSD uses the following:
>
> EXECPREFIX="e" ./configure.sh
>
> and names the package "ebc". It installs the manpages under "ebc" and
> "edc", and does the same for locales.
>
> Void Linux is a Linux distro that has my bc as a package. They call it
> "bc-gh" and use the following:
>
> EXECSUFFIX="-gh" ./configure.sh
>
> The manpages and locales are installed in the expected locations.
>
> In other words, I can name the package on NetBSD whatever I want, and
> it will still work. I do still want to keep my upstream named "bc",
> though, just so people know what it is.

We are talking about pkgsrc, which is the standard package system on
NetBSD and Illumos, and builds on about 20 systems.

I can see your point about bc, but I would urge you strongly to have a
standard name to be used when bc is not ok, so that it ends up
consistent.  Having ebc and bc-gh just does not seem helpful.  By
"have", I think I mean a normative statement in the build instructions.

I wonder if there is any packaging system where your bc is just bc.  I
suppose we could have a package bc-gh that installed to bc, and
conflicts with GNU bc, but I'm not sure that's helpful to most.