Question on package philosophy

[James Chacon]

I'm currently working my way through building each package in the tree
and checking for a proper build without errors.

Now, my philosophy here is that it should be possible (within reason) to
start at pkgsrc/ and type

make

and have things just start working through the trees and not aborting unless
they get to an error of some sort (actually right now it doesn't matter as
any error on a subdir build gets ignored over by default. I have a local
patch to make this a flag but I digress). I realize this causes dependencies
to get installed but on the first pass I'm going to live with that (I'll
build with a complete deinstall depends on each step after this pass)

In at least one case right now you can't do an unattended make (cddbd has the
config script). On things like this with cddbd what is the general opinion
here? In my local copy I patched config.sh to take an override from mk.conf
so I can just set the appropriate vars up and shoot off a long term build.

Thoughts?

James

[Dr. Rene Hexel]

James Chacon wrote:

> In at least one case right now you can't do an unattended make (cddbd has the
> config script). On things like this with cddbd what is the general opinion
> here? In my local copy I patched config.sh to take an override from mk.conf
> so I can just set the appropriate vars up and shoot off a long term build.

I believe that packages, if possible, should not be interactive, but
take their defaults from make variables if necessary. At least it
should be possible to override interactive behaviour with these
variables. This way, batch builds should be less cumbersome than they
are now ...

Cheers
,
Rene

[Frederick Bruckman]

You can at least set BATCH in /etc/mk.conf, so that interactive and
restricted packages won't be built.

Frederick

[Hubert Feyrer]

On Tue, 25 Jul 2000, James Chacon wrote:
> In at least one case right now you can't do an unattended make (cddbd has the
> config script). On things like this with cddbd what is the general opinion
> here? In my local copy I patched config.sh to take an override from mk.conf
> so I can just set the appropriate vars up and shoot off a long term build.

package that require user interaction are marked with IS_INTERACTIVE=yes,
and if you set BATCH=YES in your /etc/mk.conf, these packages are skipped.
Of course it would be nice to decrease the number of interactive packages,
see [1].

You will face another problem when you simply compile things starting at
pkgsrc root: conflicts. A more proper way is to install a package, build a
binary package, then deinstall everything, and go to the next pkg. The
soon-to-come bulk targets will do that.

[1] ftp://smaug.fh-regensburg.de/pub/NetBSD/pkgstat/20000718.2304/broken.html
is the output of the last bulk build, of the 70 unpackages packages,
quite a number are interactive (not all, though!)

- Hubert

--
NetBSD - because Unix isn't just #include <linux.h>, i386, ILP32, ELF, ...!

[Hubert Feyrer]

On Tue, 25 Jul 2000, Dr. Rene Hexel wrote:
> > In at least one case right now you can't do an unattended make (cddbd has the
> > config script). On things like this with cddbd what is the general opinion
> > here? In my local copy I patched config.sh to take an override from mk.conf
> > so I can just set the appropriate vars up and shoot off a long term build.
>

> I believe that packages, if possible, should not be interactive, but
> take their defaults from make variables if necessary. At least it
> should be possible to override interactive behaviour with these
> variables. This way, batch builds should be less cumbersome than they
> are now ...

Just a note, the pkgsrc/net/upclient pkg gets info from /etc/mk.conf if
available, and goes interactive else. Unfortunately it's kind of
information that produces binary pkgs that can't be shared easily.

[James Chacon]

Which of course isn't documented anywhere. Not in mk.conf, Packages.txt, etc.

A quick scan of the tree shows 6 packages which even use a batch notation.
Most of them use it completely differently and most are broken because they're
install steps they skip in batch mode which probably break the package if
you were attempting to install it.

James

>
>On Tue, 25 Jul 2000, Dr. Rene Hexel wrote:
>
>> > In at least one case right now you can't do an unattended make (cddbd has the
>> > config script). On things like this with cddbd what is the general opinion
>> > here? In my local copy I patched config.sh to take an override from mk.conf
>> > so I can just set the appropriate vars up and shoot off a long term build.
>>
>> I believe that packages, if possible, should not be interactive, but
>> take their defaults from make variables if necessary. At least it
>> should be possible to override interactive behaviour with these
>> variables. This way, batch builds should be less cumbersome than they
>> are now ...
>