*BSD ports (was ...)

Harlan asks:

> Does anybody know if the FreeBSD "ports" collection mechanism (which uses
> pmake) has been ported to "standard" make?

The NetBSD ports people have a "side project" called
Zoularis, which makes it possible (if you are the developer
of it :-) to do the NetBSD ports-thing [conceptually close
to FreeBSD ports] on Solaris.

I looked at it pretty hard about a year ago -- I am less
than pleased that we have a package manager... -- but it was
far too delicate and still-unportable-to-lots-of-things.

(And about a year before that, I looked at RPM pretty hard.
It is portable, but good luck getting a set of spec files
that work for anything but Red Hat Linux.)

The openpackages thing has come along since then, & Jos is
right that it's a good place to look.  (Rats, I feel another
mailing-list subscription coming on.)

As I put in the ways-to-use web page, building an ARK world
on top of one of those things would be *fantastic*.

Will