tech-pkg: integrating software supplied by the OS (on some platforms)?

Subject: integrating software supplied by the OS (on some platforms)?
To: None <tech-pkg@netbsd.org>
From: Georg Schwarz <georg.schwarz@freenet.de>
List: tech-pkg
Date: 04/08/2006 19:10:29

Looking at pkgsrc/lang/sun-jre13 as well as its CVS history it looks 
like that package has been modified to recognize in the case of 
Darwin the JRE version supplied by the OS.
At least as of today, there are some issues involved though:
a) the current version of Mac OS X, 10.4, comes with JRE 1.4, not 1.3
b) more severely, the package does not (no longer?) work on Darwin 
since it tries to install patches where there has been nothing to 
patch in the working directory
I think the best solution would be to remove the Darwin-specific 
stuff from the package and make it *-*-i386 only again.
However, one would need another mechanism to tell pkgsrc (on systems 
like Darwin and maybe also Solaris) to use the system-supplied JRE 
which is version X.Y (for cases where that might matter). Is there 
already such a mechanism? In the end the package for Darwin at least 
tries to do exactly that. I'd prefer however a mechanism which does 
not even make pkgsrc descend into that package on systems where it 
should used the OS-supplied version of JRE.
The same issue seems to exist for sun-jdk13, BTW.
-- 
Georg Schwarz http://home.pages.de/~schwarz/
georg.schwarz@freenet.de +49 178 8545053