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Message-ID: <3BF450CE.1010706@ece.gatech.edu>
Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2001 18:33:34 -0500
From: Charles Wilson <cwilson AT ece DOT gatech DOT edu>
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To: John Marshall <jmarshall AT acm DOT org>
CC: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
Subject: Re: new site for my ports is up
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John Marshall wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 14, 2001 at 05:56:45PM -0500, Charles Wilson wrote:
> 
>>My point was that the off-site versions should install into /usr/local
>>(or /opt/ or whatever, just *NOT* /usr).  When you're ready to
>>contribute them to the main dist, THEN (and only then) rebuild them to
>>install into /usr and upload (to sourceware) as a test release.
>>
> 
> Er, can you say why?


Way back at the dawn of time (which 1.1 was first released and "cygwin" was 
split into the many separate packages we now know and love) it was decided 
that "official" packages would install into /usr.

That's all.

Common courtesy then requires that if you are creating an *unofficial* 
package, that you do NOT put it into /usr, lest it be confused with an 
official version.


> Over in RPM land, I have users telling me that they want the
> /usr v /usr/local decision to be determined by whether something is
> package managed (and thus uninstallable via rpm/setup), rather than
> by whether it happens to come from the vendor.


Well, we certainly can't stop you from doing whatever you want.  However, I 
believe the LSB/FSH actually *does* say something about distribution-vendor 
supplied packages treated differently from "random" ones.  But I could be 
wrong (it's happened before).


> So I get flamed for producing a .rpm that installs to /usr/local, and
> am probably going to change to /usr because I think they're right.


If you are creating your own distribution, then *YOU* are the vendor.  You 
can put whatever you like into /usr.  or /fred.  Just don't refer your 
users to us.


> Many of my dumb users want to run Cygwin programs from a DOS window.
> So if I installed to /usr/local I would need to tell them to add two
> directories (C:\Cygwin\bin & C:\Cygwin\usr\local\bin) to their Windows
> PATH instead of one, increasing the scope for screwups.


Oh, the horror.  And msvcvar.bat doesn't add 4 or 5 dirs to the path?


> Currently I produce a package for Cygwin setup.exe that installs to
> /usr, and I'm about to start getting flamed for that too?  :-)


No.  We can't stop you, and really have no interest in flaming you about 
your personal cygwin-derived distribution.  Just so we don't get spillover 
questions on the list.


> Having off-site packages install to /usr/local on Cygwin would certainly
> show whether they were official or not (cf rpm -qi), but that information
> is already pretty much available in /etc/setup/installed.db if off-site
> people deliver their package tarballs to setup in a directory other than
> "latest" or "contrib".


But latest and contrib are going away, AFAIRC.  Chris has a grand 
refactoring scheme where the packages actually live in a tree structure 
related to the primary category (Net, Base, Lib, Graphics, etc)

right, Chris?

Oh, and long term, installed.db may become an actual database instead of a 
simple text file...

--Chuck


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