[bug-gsrc] Removal of non-GNU packages from GSRC

[Brandon Invergo]

Hi everyone,

To date, GSRC has had a bit of a haphazard means of handling external
(non-GNU) dependencies. In some cases, these dependencies were provided
by GSRC, while in other cases it was expected that the user install
the necessary dependencies with his/her package manager first. The
former cases have full build scripts while the latter cases have dummy
build scripts that notify the user of the dependency.

Since the purpose of GSRC is to provide an easy means of installing GNU
packages from source and it is not intended to be a full GNU/Linux
distribution, it does not make much sense for it to also provide several
non-GNU packages. Their inclusion also poses problems for me to ensure
that GSRC is kept up-to-date by having to follow several external
projects for updates. 

Thus, I am now beginning the process of migrating all non-GNU packages
to having only dummy build scripts. Note that I will not push any
changes to Savannah until the process is complete.

As a user, if you have any of these non-GNU packages installed via GSRC,
you have essentially two choices:

1) before you update your GSRC directory to the latest changes (either
via the bzr repo or at the next release), uninstall any package
installed from the "deps" sub-directory. You may do this from the shell,
for example, by entering something like:

    $ for d in deps/*; do make -C $d uninstall uninstall-pkg clean; done 
2>/dev/null

Note that if you do this, you will have to rebuild any packages that
were built using these dependencies.

2) you may ignore the change and keep the packages installed, but when
you do choose to remove them, you will have to do it manually. You will
have to remove each package's directory under both the "packages" and
".gar" sub-directorys under the prefix where you install software with
GSRC. In addition, all of the files listed in ".gar/{package}/FILES will
have to be manually removed. 

I apologize for any inconvenience that this causes, but it will be
better for the project in the long run. If you are looking for a full
package manager with the intention of providing a full distribution, I
recommend that you look into the GNU Guix projet
(http://www.gnu.org/s/guix). 

If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to raise them here!

Cheers,
Brandon