Re: [fink-core] Could it be possible to install fink on a non- Mac OS X system?

[Martin Q. <Mar...@tu...>]

On Tue, Feb 24, 2004 at 02:53:59PM -0500, David R. Morrison wrote:

> > I even have the feeling that it could be possible to get some of your
> > patches integrated into debian. But if you no reason for that, I must be
> > wrong.
>=20
> It might be possible, but I think we've had the impression that the debian
> folks can't see a good reason to accept patches from us.

Indeed, I think that the resiting patch may be difficult to integrate into
debian, since the produced packages won't follow the FHS. That's not
impossible (if they are well separated, and activated only under some
conditions), but not trivial either.

For the port to darwin, it may be different. That of course only apply to
softwares developped within debian, such as dpkg. BTW, do you use debconf?

I was thinking about establishing a debian sub-project which could be called
Co-debian, and which goal would be to make debian suited to be used as
operating environment on other OSes. I think it could get approved by debian
guys, but I cannot do all the work myself, of course, and need your help...

This goal is also very close to the Debian GNU/w32 effort
(http://debian-cygwin.sourceforge.net/), which is already present on the
Debian web pages (under ports).

I bet that the patches to the Debian tools could be made very small when
using cdbs. That means easily maintainable, and even integratable in some
cases.

> > Wouldn't it be better to take a debian source package, recompile it with
> > specific tools and get a fink package, instead of redoing the packaging
> > work?=3D20
>=20
> Actually, there are historical reasons why we do things in our own way.
> For the first 6 months or so of it's existence, fink used "stow" rather
> than "dpkg" as its basic installation engine.  By the time that fink's
> creator switched to debian tools, he already had fink's source package
> system designed and implemented.  At that point, he only changed the
> underlying installation engine to debian, not the entire fink system.

What would be needed to change the source format? I mean, it could be
possible to convert almost automatically fink source packages to debian
ones. Whould you accept to go that way? Under what conditions?

> > Cool, I'll have a look at this, then. The first step would be to separa=
te
> > the resiting facilities from the port to OSX in the patches.=20
>=20
> As I said above, it shouldn't be necessary to split patches.  In some
> cases, it might be necessary to fix up the fink patch so that it doesn't
> do damage to another OS.

That's even better. But I'd still prefer splitted patches to ease their
integration upstream. I'm very sure that the dpkg maintainers will never
accept a 30k patch. But when there is 30 times 1k patches, some of them
could get in.

Again, and if you don't mind, I advice you to have a look at the quilt tool,
which is really great to maintain piles of patches. I comes from the
linux-kernel world, and those guys know what several kb of patches mean.
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/quilt

> > Would you
> > accept to split your patches that way if I do the grunt work ? Or am I =
to
> > redo the split again and again at each new version?

Thanks for your time, Mt.

--=20
It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for programming,=20
but couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.
    --- Anonymous