2001-Apr-05

Using the latest pkgsrc, I see that my libao has changed (it has additions to use new sun/bsd audio libao driver). So it needs automake, autoconf and others. "make" said "... is an a.out package. ... Please update ... to ELF." I already had a.out's working -- they did work. But I deleted them, used pkg_add and grabbed a few binary packages via ftp. Very quick! I asked about it and received: (Dr. Hexel). "For executables, there is usually no problem, but for libraries, plugins, etc. there is. Since the package system has no way of knowing whether a package in ELF format will actually work together with a prerequisite package in a.out format, it's probably best to play safe."

I worked on my patch to from bsd.pkg.mk so it would use pkg/ instead of files/ for the checksum files. (See 15/Mar/2001 in this journal.) I made two patches and sent to tech-pkg. The first patch modified it so it would abort with a message if missing checksum (md5) file, report and abort if missing patch-sum, and report that patches' checksums are okay. (Patch is here: http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-pkg/2001/04/05/0006.html.) * I need to patch this again -- this time using NO_CHECKSUM -- and send-pr it.

The second patch uses pkg/ directory instead of files/ directory for md5 and patch-sum. It also changes name of md5 to checksum. This patch is better than my previous patch (Mar. 15), because it will fallback to previous defaults (so it can work with old packages). The benefit (in the long run) is to remove unnecessary files/ directories. This should save a little space and a lot of time. Well, A. Crooks already had started implementing similar ideas; he provided a patch.