Re: Base packaging

On Wed, 2003-09-17 at 15:45, Mark Murray wrote:
> Paul Richards writes:
> > I've got a prototype setup that packages the base tree. It turned out to
> > be very simple. It needs a lot more polishing and testing but it looks
> > like this can definitely be made to work with just some tidying up and
> > re-arranging of our existing make files. I've succesfully created
> > packages of /sbin by adding the following to /usr/src/sbin/Makefile
> > 
> > --
> > PORTNAME= FreeBSD-sbin
> > PORTVERSION= 1.0
> > COMMENT=sbin
> > CATEGORIES=misc
> > --
> 
> ... etc.
> 
> This is excellent!
> 
> However, I suspect that a marginally better place to use these would be
> in the "make distribute" target that "make release" uses. This way, the
> files are already separated out into directory structures, and it may be
> easier to build complex pkg-plist's with find(1). ALSO, it may be easier
> to make more fine-grained packages (DISTRIBUTION=foo) with this.

I looked into this originally so that I could use the standard BSD make
includes for a project in work but I needed some way to have "install"
wrappered so that any files installed by my project were registered in a
package. Therefore, I wouldn't want it restricted to just FreeBSD
release scripts since I want to be able to use it outside of the FreeBSD
tree.

I was thinking of adding an option to install so it registers the file
in a plist rather than actually doing the install. A seperate "make
plist" target could then be used as a helper target to automate the
generation of plists.

If we want to get even more resilient, we could pass a plist file to
install and have install abort if the file to install is missing from
the plist e.g. return an "out of date package" error or something.

Paul.