Friday, April 18, 2008

Something for Rilgon and Pike

Hey guys,
This isn't WoW-related as such, but it's something I wanted to offer to any Linux or UNIX users who might read this; Rilgon and Pike primarily, but anyone else who's interested.

Although I don't use Linux myself now really, back when I did, for a while I was working on a Linux-specific version of the FreeBSD ports system. (A source-based software installer; actually the one which Gentoo's portage was originally based on, for those of you who know about that)

It's very closely related; moreso than Gentoo's system, actually, which from what little I saw was bash based. My own core makefile is more or less a simplified version of the original bsd.port.mk, and also uses NetBSD's version of Make as well. I was in the process of fairly substantially restructuring it when I more or less completely abandoned it, largely because the few people who knew about it told me that the software installation problem had been well and truly solved, and all I was really doing was wasting time.

I have no idea whether or not anyone reading this could have any use for it, but even though I don't work on Linux at all myself now as I said, I put a fair bit of work into this at one point, so it'd be good if someone could get some sort of use out of it.

The code is here:-
http://sourceforge.net/projects/acbuild.

It's very rough; you'll need to pull it out of CVS directly as I never actually made a tarball for it, but it is thoroughly documented, both in a readme and in the code itself. There are also working targets for fetch, (download) configure, make, and make install. I never got checksum working, but it shouldn't be hard to do. I had a very experimental target for binary packaging in the works, but never got that to successfully function, either.

Of perhaps slightly more interest to Pike might be the fact that although they're unfinished, I also started producing Makefiles for the phase one packages from the Linux From Scratch project; so Pike, if you ever wanted to make a completely custom system, you'd have the basis at least for a means of compiling it.

I hope someone is perhaps able to find it useful.

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