Re: Improving GNU PM translator

[Luca Ferroni]

Il Sun, 26 Sep 2004 19:35:18 +0200,  "Alfred M. Szmidt" <address@hidden> ha 
scritto:

> GSC is a program that given a set of tarballs (lots of 'em), creates
> packages that can be used to install a program.
 
What do you mean with "GSC creates packages" ?
Do the
./configure && make install DESTDIR=/package/foo
procedure ?

I don't understand differences between packages and tarballs,
As you said in another message:

A> We want to have plain tarballs that one can use.  So that
A> something like,

A> ./configure && make install DESTDIR=/package/foo
A> ln -s /packages/foo /package/foo

A> is possible to install a package. 

It seems that tarball and package are the same concepts.

>    In GNU PM plans, I read you talked about implementing package
>    manager like BSD ports or, I suggest, Gentoo's Portage.
> 
> No.  Nothing of the sort.  BSD ports (I am not that familiar with
> Portage) isn't a package manager.  Yes, you can use it to install and
> remove packages, but this is really done by the pkg_add and pkg_del
> utilities.  The BSD ports just contain a bunch of rules that say how
> to build a package, what it depends on etc; it in reality resemble
> more apt-get then anything (apt-get is a wrapper around dpkg, the
> package manager).
>

It is exactly what I meant, but maybe I didn't explain it well.
I was wrong in that I said "package manager" instead of GSC, sorry.
 
> The translator won't ask anything from the GSC,
> nor will it download anything, or "configure" anything (I guess you
> mean pre/post install/uninstall script, we don't want to use things
> like that).  It won't extract anything.
> 

I know that translator currently does not ask anything to GSC,
but that's my proposal.
Ok. I think I have understood the situation.
GNU PM translator, will involve / and we can set it to act on
/bin /sbin /usr/bin or whatever else directory we want.
Translator I am talking about, is a translator for /packages itself.
It may be written later, so probably is not the moment to talk about it
with other messages.

I simply explain my point of view:
my translator is a layer between user and /packages.
Layer means (correct me if I am wrong again) that read and write
operations may be filtered by the translator.
Translator job consists in:
- installing a package as you try to make a subdirectory
or a symlink in /packages

- showing real package directories (instead symlinks) when someone
reads /packages

> Please read the previous discussion about the issue, it was laid out
> quite in detail about how things would be going on.

I read quite all of them,
I'm sorry if I can't provide a better explanation, 
but this is the best English I can write.
Bye

-- 
Luca Ferroni
www.cs.unibo.it/~fferroni/