Re: looking for comments on this installation program

[Zack Weinberg <zack@rabi.phys.columbia.edu>]

On Sat, 16 May 1998 16:29:49 -0400, Roland McGrath wrote:
>It seems a little dubious to me writing a program to do this for the libc
>install.  That is what the package installation programs exist to do, and
>if they don't do it right they should be made to.

AFAIK the packagers do do it right.  The program is for the case where
people don't have a packager.

I want (eventually) to have 'make install' detect and use either rpm
or dpkg.

>The file you talk about generating during make install is mostly already
>there, in distinfo.  The (unfinished) rpm/Makefile stuff uses this to put
>together the rpm specs.  
>
>All we need is for that info to be a little more structured and list where
>in the build tree the installed files come from as well as where they go.

*nod*

>I guess if we go this direction, it can be a pretty straightforward program
>to just read this text file and do the installation, so we can include such
>a program (if Zack wants to write one) that hackers can use to install libc
>if they don't want to use a package system.

The program I posted needs serious work which I don't have the skills
to do -- my C abilities are limited.  I rewrote it so that it's
inextricably tied to a Perl script that does all the text bashing, but
we can't use that.

For 2.1 I will beat the program into a shape that's usable to install
libc.so, ld.so, libdl.so atomically; that's the immediate problem.  It
will have almost no syntax checking, and won't be suitable to do the
whole install.  For 2.2 I'd like to do as you suggest with the
distinfo file.

zw