🚀 go-pugleaf

mhiroshi writes:
>I currently, must rewrite every codes of GNU's when I install them.
>Firstly because the GNU tools are not organized in this manner.
>Secondly, I want seperate GNU's directory for the ease of maintainance.
>(The GNU products updates very rapidly, so making tape backup of only
>GNU's sources and binary is much easier than they are mixed into
>the others in /usr/local. )

Mike McDonnell writes:
> I heartily agree.  Other large software distributions such as khoros
> use this method and it works quite well for the reasons mentioned.
> Even the configure script provided with libg++ has defaults of
> /usr/local for the base path.  This should be changed, and I think
> /usr/gnu is appropriate.

Something I hate doing is editing a bunch of Makefiles and header
files and browsing through the man pages in order to manually con-
figure the program to work.

With GCC/G++/LibG++ 2.0, I see a nice trend towards a standardized
compiling system, but using just a shell script to determine how
to compile stuff (ala configure) is not really enough.  The GNU
base path problem is one of several problems that I think should
be addressed.  Manual configuration of makefiles and header files
to get around system differences is another.  

mhiroshi writes:
> 3) The other idea is that all the programs are made so that
> it refers the user's environment variable as the base directory
> of the GNU products.

I have too many envariables already, I agree with Mike for the same
reasons that I don't want an OPENWINHOME variable.

After fumbling with installing several GNU packages last weekend, I
asked myself repeatedly, why doesn't GNU use something similar to
Imakefiles and xmkmf?  Call them Gmakefiles and gmkmf.  In order to
take some of the guesswork out for programmers, have them follow a
set standard (like POSIX with GNU extensions) and make a compatability
library for each system architecture so that they  don't have to tweak
anything to get their program to run across different platforms.

Just an idea.
--
Eric Ziegast