Re: [MiNT] old KGMD or new NMD?

[Michael Schwingen <rincewind@discworld.dascon.de>]

On Tue, Feb 09, 1999 at 07:07:05PM +0100, Konrad Kokoszkiewicz wrote:
> Autoconf can change anything, including the paths. Actually, I compiled
> ircd some time ago and it was only the question of tuning the config.h.

Correct. However, with useful paths on the system, you won't have to tune
anything.

> I didn't mean distribution packages, this is not a problem to keep as many
> distributions as we like (PIWO has almost empty disk). I mean keeping the
> ports of addons twice or more, like:
> 
> pine-7.35-beta-KGMD.tar.gz
> pine-7.35-beta-NMD.tar.gz
> pine-7.35-beta-YAMD.tar.gz (yet another mint distr...)

I see no necessity to that. IMHO, the method debian uses is quite good: they
distribute the original tar.gz file with unmodified, official sources, plus
a patch file containing the local modifications.

As soon as we have everything included in the original sources, we don't
need any patch file - however, we can produce a patch which makes the paths
correct for an old KGMD system - not much waste for disk space, and
definitely no need for multiple tar.gz files.

Anyway, a file like pine-7.35-KGMD.tar.gz is a bad thing anyway, IMHO: if a
new pine version comes out, I have to figure out what was changed in the
...-KGMD archive - which means that I first need the original pine
source archive (and the correct version of course, to produce a diff), which
I can then incorporate into the new version. This can be difficult - the
current original source archive is easy to find on many mirrors, but older
versions tend to get removed soon.

In contrast, patch files change less frequent, and even an outdated patch
file can be manually applied to the current source in most cases.

cu
Michael
-- 
Michael Schwingen, Ahornstrasse 36, 52074 Aachen