Remove +with_default_names and use a specific path for unprefixed binaries

Ryan Schmidt ryandesign at macports.org
Fri Sep 18 08:06:32 PDT 2009


On Sep 18, 2009, at 09:58, Mark A. Miller wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 6:40 AM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:
>
>> Yes, I did mean one libexec/${name} directory for each port that  
>> we're talking about here. I see this variant in coreutils,  
>> diffutils, findutils, gsed, gnetcat, gnutar, gwhich, and m4. gawk  
>> doesn't have this variant but whatever solution we come up with for  
>> the others could be applied to gawk as well. Whether having a  
>> separate directory for each of those is excessive depends on the  
>> purpose of having the directory in the first place. Since I am not  
>> a person who wants these utilities with their default names, I  
>> wasn't sure what those who do want that are wanting exactly, that's  
>> why I was asking.
>
> Doing a separate path for each separate utility would be...insane, I  
> think. And doesn't really give me what at least I would want to use  
> it for. I either want all GNU or all BSD, no mixing flavors.

Ok. Then let's just do a single "gnubin" directory as you said.

>> Ah, true, nothing is preventing anyone from making their own  
>> symlinks somewhere. In which case, there isn't even a problem with  
>> just removing the with_default_names variants entirely and not  
>> creating a replacement. But it would be nice to at least symlink  
>> them into one directory.
>
> Symlinking doesn't always work. There are some packages (yes, scary  
> enough) that *despite* the fact you have a perfectly fine symlink in  
> a directory for it, try to do something like "stat -L" on the  
> symlink for the utilities path. It's rare, but I've seen it occur.  
> (It's also sick and broken, but what can you do...)

Well, all we're proposing is that the ports should automatically  
create default-named symlinks in ${prefix}/libexec/gnubin to the  
programs that are being installed. So if that doesn't work for what  
you need, then the proposed changes won't help... But I don't see why  
a program would do a "stat -L" on awk or sed or grep...

The current with_default_names variants also all just create default- 
named symlinks, though in ${prefix}/bin. And you haven't mentioned  
that not working...



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