Re: Enchancment suggestion

[Jeff Waugh <jdub perkypants org>]

<quote who="tmacur1">

> Right now garnome is really wastefull.... Many packages remain the same
> from one version to the other. Nonetheless, everything is redownloaded and
> recompiled for every new release. For people with little bandwidth and
> patience this is very irritating (of course I am not recommending this for
> myself... I have a Comacast Cable (200kb) and a ASUS A7m266-D with 2
> Athlon 2000+ SMP's 8-).

Use GARCHIVE in current versions (and in all previous versions, its parent,
FILE_SITES).

> If garnome would run "pkg-config $(PKG_NAME) --modversion" every time it tried 
> to install a package, it would be really easy to catch redundancies. There 
> could even be an option in gar.conf.mk (MAKE_ALL = 1 ?) to really recompile 
> everythink when the situation warrents this.

Except applications, which do not install pkgconfig files.

> Sometimes we won't be able to use pkg-config but might have to run: $(app) 
> --version.

Not guaranteed to work at all.

> What do you think? This way we would be doing our bit to lower the demands on 
> the open-source servers and saving time at the same time.

The only interesting problem here is avoiding rebuilds of the same software,
and correct method of doing it is keeping an external index of installed
packages and versions. The download side of things is already solved.

However, it is not a huge interest of mine at the moment, because GARNOME is
not designed for users. Both GARNOME and GAR need to ensure buildability
from the bottom up, and right now, the simplest method of doing that is by
building the entire stack.

At some stage, I will look into it, but it's not a huge priority.

> BTW how many garnome users are there?

No idea. "Lots." :-)

- Jeff

-- 
   I must be getting old... Buying toothpaste with gel in it is no longer   
                           an Absolute Necessity.