On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 03:16:16PM -0700, John Meacham wrote:
On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 02:59:16PM +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:
To generate a distro package from an autoconf package either the package author has to include support for that distro, or a distro packager has to write specific support for that package. There's no way to do generic autoconf->distro package generation, like there is with Cabal.
In cabal you only get it because you convinced the cabal people to put in code to support your distro. Which isn't much different than asking the package manager too.
I don't understand this. Cabal doesn't have any distro-specific code.
And besides, this ability has nothing to do with cabal's configuration management capabilities, simply its metadata format.
I don't understand this either. You imply you like Cabal's metadata, which says "I depend on network version 1", right? But you don't like Cabal's configuration management? What is Cabal's configuration management, then?
and there are many automatic package managers for autoconf style packages.
http://encap.org/ - one I use on pretty much all my systems. since it is distro independent.
OK, so here's an encap package for DBI:
http://encap.org/search/encapinfo.fcgi?collection=cites&archive=DBI-1.21-encap-sparc-solaris8.tar.gz
ftp://ftp.encap.org/pub/encap/pkgs/cites/DBI-1.21-encap-sparc-solaris8.tar.gz
This tarball contains an encapinfo file that says
encap 2.1 # libencap-2.2.1
platform sparc-solaris8
date Mon Mar 11 19:38:02 CST 2002
contact "Mark D. Roth"