[pacman-dev] Configure --prefix in PKGBUILD scripts

[Dan McGee]

On Wed, Jun 4, 2008 at 6:34 AM, Antonio Huete Jimenez
<ahuete.devel at gmail.com> wrote:
> And how is supposed I can change the prefix for a wide variety of PKGBUILD
> and still have them useable under Archlinux and others???
>
> I still say that having separate ABS tree don't have any benefit for other
> OSes.

Please try to refrain from top-posting when the quoted email is relevant.

You are asking for two conflicting things, and confusing two
relatively different issues.

Are you using BSD as:
1. A kernel where you want to build the Arch userland around?
2. An existing operating system where you are going to manage a few
packages with pacman?

For situation (1), I can see your point- in this case, maybe the Arch
ABS tree should be relatively usable out of the box. But guess what?
Arch isn't BSD, so just because you change the kernel doesn't mean the
package paths change- part of the Arch mindset is not using /usr/local
by default, etc. so changing paths just because you changed to a BSD
kernel would be unjustified.

For situation (2), you are dealing with a whole different set of
issues. pacman and makepkg are not pkgsrc replacements, so how could
you expect PKGBUILDs designed for a Linux system and with certain
configure options would work flawlessly on your BSD system? For the
rest of us, this PREFIX option would just make things less KISS and we
wouldn't use it (because it is easier to deal with /usr rather than
$PREFIX).

It sounds like I'm ragging and being Mr. Negative here, but you have
to realize this PREFIX thing is *one* small difference in a world of
many between an Arch system and an existing BSD system.

-Dan