Upgrading gettext breaks many ports

[Bob Amen]

Frank McPherson wrote:
>
> On Oct 2, 2006, at 7:02 AM, Piet van Oostrum wrote:
>> I think the dependency systems should be much more sophisticated.
>> Preferably with automatic garbage collection to prevent libraries from
>> disappearing when they are still needed. I think MacPorts would be a 
>> good
>> candidate for NiX: <http://www.cs.uu.nl/wiki/Trace/Nix> and if people 
>> are
>> interested I can see if we can start a research project to develop a NiX
>> version of MacPorts.
>
> I agree that the dependency system should be more sophisticated. I'd 
> like to help with this issue because I've spent a lot of time recently 
> trying to sort out these library dependency issues on my macports 
> systems.
>
> It's difficult to tell anything about the stability of the NiX project 
> from their webpage. Their subversion repository does have some recent 
> activity, but it is all one developer. Do you have a good idea of the 
> stability and activity on the project?
>
> I think it would be useful to gain a good understanding of the 
> implementation and limitations of the current package management 
> system, and also to objectively compare other package management 
> systems we could use. The core macports folks would have to weigh in 
> on these issues since they'd be the ones merging in any changes. 
> There's a mention in /opt/local/etc/ports.conf about an sqlite db 
> format; it might be worthwhile to find out more about the status of 
> that effort. 

    How about looking at the ports system that Gentoo uses? 
(http:www.gentoo.org) I've been using that system for several years and 
never had the kinds of problems with dependencies that resulted in this 
thread. We're moving most of our Linux systems to Gentoo, in part 
because of the ease of use. It's written in Python and seems to be quite 
portable. There was an effort at Gentoo to make it completely portable. 
I'm not sure how that effort went.

Cheers,
Bob

-- 
				Bob Amen
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