Re: installation instructions on OpenBSD and FreeBSD

[Marc Espie]

On Thu, Mar 15, 2001 at 07:23:15PM +0100, Akim Demaille wrote:
> >>>>> "Marc" == Marc Espie <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> Bruno> Also, on HP-UX my first attempt was "cc", my second was "cc
> Bruno> -Aa", my third was "cc -Aa -D_HPUX_SOURCE", and only with some
> Bruno> help by Jim or Paul I knew that "cc -Ae" is the right
> Bruno> thing. It's not obvious.
> 
> >> That's why it is configure which must find it.

> Marc> I don't have any objection to guessing at -I/usr/local/include
> Marc> and -L/usr/local/lib on BSDs...

> :P

> Just for my information, why is it so?

Short answer: because we're not a gnu-system.  :)

We don't install all gnu stuff in /usr like Linux distro tends to, 
but we do install a few gnu tools we can't (yet) make
without as part of the base system, like the compiler.

In that case, gcc, being a system compiler, is configured to look at the
base system only. Everything in /usr/local, in /usr/X11R6... is not part
of the system proper. It's just the way we want our system organized.

This issue comes back frequently. As a matter of fact, the gcc distribution
that is distributed by the FSF is not quite what is part of OpenBSD, nor
FreeBSD, nor OpenBSD... precisely because of this.

(I do try to feed every other change to the FSF back, though).

We also have some X11 magic so that the base X11 distribution appears under
/usr/X11R6, but everything compiled by ports using imake appears under
/usr/local.

It is not real hard to make work. We do have some problems with some code
that does not conform to the gnu coding standards (absence of DESTDIR in
Makefiles), but still, we manage to compile roughly 1,100 third party
applications correctly with but a very few tweaks (our ports tree is
growing, slowly because of a high level of attention to details).