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Re: [Scsh-hackers] Library to ease package installation

To: Anthony Carrico <acarrico@memebeam.org>
Subject: Re: [Scsh-hackers] Library to ease package installation
From: Michel Schinz <Michel.Schinz@epfl.ch>
Date: Fri Nov 14 08:18:25 2003
Cc: scsh-hackers@lists.sourceforge.net
List-id: Discussion among the implementors <scsh-hackers.lists.sourceforge.net>
Sender: scsh-hackers-admin@lists.sourceforge.net
Anthony Carrico <acarrico@memebeam.org> writes:

[...]

> Most all unix software is converging on the GNU Coding Conventions for
> installation, which (among other things) say that to install:
>   configure
>   make install
>
> and to unistall:
>   make uninstall
>
> Note that the configure script need not necessarily use autoconf or
> anything, it could just be empty or just check that scsh is installed,
> etc. Also, the Makefile could just call out to the install script
> which you described in your message.
>
> Is there any reason not to follow these conventions?

Well, my main reason was that I did not see a reason for following
them. I think these conventions are indeed well established for
stand-alone packages (like scsh itself) but not for add-on packages.
For example Perl, Python and XEmacs all have a package-managment
system built entirely on the underlying programming language.
Something similar is in preparation for Haskell (see
http://www.haskell.org/libraryInfrastructure/proposal/, an interesting
document).

Do you think that using make would be a good idea because it is
standard, or because you think that make's features are important to
have in build/install scripts?

Michel.



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