Re: [Fink-devel] Re: fink ChangeLog,1.363,1.364 fink.conf.5.in,1.31,1.32

[Benjamin R. <ra...@be...>]

Dave Vasilevsky wrote:

> This seems a little...er...specific. Maybe that's ok I guess, but it 
> feels wrong somehow. If this is an ability that people find themselves 
> wanting, maybe we should generalize it?

Yeah, couldn't really think of a way to do so that didn't look goofy...

> We could have a Executables: option that lists name:path pairs, and 
> could eventually let users specify alternatives for anything. Or a 
> exec-prefix dir where users could just drop symlinks to executables 
> they'd prefer Fink would use. Or maybe Fink should even put the Fink 
> paths at the *end* of PATH instead of the beginning, so it uses whatever 
> the user has in his|her path (at the risk of choosing something bad).

I'm not such a big fan of the "magic path" idea of symlinks, we already 
have enough uncertainty in what is ending up in the user's path, I'd 
rather when we get a bug report from a user, it's obvious that it's 
calling /sw/bin/pbzip2 rather than just 'bzip2' that happens to point to 
a symlink without us knowing it...

> Opinions, anyone?

Honestly, I was originally just going to make the bzip2 bit use pbzip2 
if it exists, but figured that was forcing the user into something 
that's still technically beta code, so I thought I'd make it configurable.

I don't really like the specificity either, but couldn't think of a 
better way to do it, although I suppose we could do something like this 
if it really needs to be generalized:

Executables: <<
   bzip2: /sw/bin/pbzip2 -q
<<

(hah!  heredocs in fink.conf!)