[arch-dev-public] Adding a "posix" metapackage

[Eli Schwartz]

On 1/3/20 10:22 AM, Santiago Torres-Arias via arch-dev-public wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 03, 2020 at 03:49:11PM +0100, Robin Broda via arch-dev-public wrote:
>> On 1/3/20 5:35 AM, Eli Schwartz via arch-dev-public wrote:
>>> After a bit of research work and making sure one or two things have been
>>> properly packaged, I've developed a PKGBUILD which ensures that a system
>>> has the POSIX shell and utilities (XCU) section installed. I believe
>>> this is an interesting thing to track, and people will want to know they
>>> have it installed... in aid of this, I've gotten two major holdouts
>>> packaged a while back -- pax (thanks to dbermond) and ncompress.
>>>
>>> I'd like to add this package to community, although given it's never
>>> been in the AUR before, it's never had AUR votes...
>>>
>>> One of the advantages of having this metapackage is that someone can,
>>> while installing arch, `pacman -S posix-user-portability` and get
>>> essentially everything one would expect to have available on a unix-like
>>> platform, most notably, the interesting parts of the base group that no
>>> longer have an equivalent. i.e. man-db, vi, patch, diffutils, ed.
>>>
>>> I've only included XCU for now, because the system interfaces and
>>> headers are a bit out of scope for me to package and replace in the
>>> event that they'd be missing anything... and also because I'm mainly
>>> interested in the POSIX toolset itself. That being said, I'd certainly
>>> be open to suggested improvements, should anyone have recommendations
>>> for expanding the scope.
>>>
>>> Thoughts?
>>>
>>
>> I think it's a great idea, i definitely see myself using posix{,-user-portability} once it becomes available.
>>
> 
> +1 to this. I definitely think this would be useful to have when
> needed. I'm curious, though, are there any specifics about the providers
> on these POSIX tools/libraries/whatnot (i.e., would it be wortwhile
> discussing the alternatives?).

Depends on the alternative. I think the most logical way to do providers
would be via https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/User:Allan/Alternatives

Currently, the repos do things like have cronie and fcron available, but
if you actually want crontab you need to install the former -- the
latter doesn't provide the POSIX tool, it provides "fcrontab" which is
the wrong name. So it's not eligible *today* to meet the requirements.

-- 
Eli Schwartz
Bug Wrangler and Trusted User

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