[aps-devel] From source?

[Lalo Martins]

Hi there, nice project ;-) I found it while researching if I should start a
similar one... but yours seem promising and in the right track, so I prefer
to contribute.

I am a GNU advocate since IIRC '96, have been a Debian developer for a few
years, then I gave up and become a Debian user.  Now I switched to Gentoo
and I'm convinced ports-like "from source" pkg systems are the only
reasonable way to distribute/manage modern Free Software (for an example of
what I mean, check how many .debs there are for SDL: one compiled for arts,
one for oss, one for osd, one with everything plus a dummy package).

So, I'd like to inquire as to the other extremity of the process; so far you
have been talking about installing/updating/removing packages, unionfs etc.
But how do you get the package in the first place?

I'd like to plead for a ports/portage like system.  If this is going to be
official GNU stuff, I suppose we could hook Guile into it (as I can't see
how such a system would work without scripting).

It strikes me that building official GNU software is straightforward due to
the Coding Standards; we have a more or less hard guarantee that "cd foo;
./configure; make; make install prefix=/tmp_fs_something" does the trick.
However I would like to have a facility similar to portage's USE switches,
if possible hooked right into configure's --with/--enable.

So, am I speaking (or writing, actually) nonsense?  Have you already thought
about this aspect?

[]s,
                                               |alo
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