I've been working on doing a new mipsel port to strange hardware, and one thing that really caught me in my bootstrap environment was /lib/rcscripts/filefuncs.so* Could it be moved out of the gawk package, and into either baselayout or a new package, to make future porting easier?
gawk is used heavily in baselayout so you really cant port baselayout without porting gawk ...
also, filefuncs used to be part of baselayout, but azarah moved it to gawk
The reason I want to move it is so that it can be easily put into place without having to emerge gawk (which is currently failing for me, but I suspect a toolchain issue [I haven't got it onto a gentoo toolchain yet]). There is a gawk on the box already however, that is why it is possible to split this up. I ended up copying the filefuncs source out to /tmp and installing it manually, then baselayout started working (and since then gcc+binutils are still building, successfully it appears so far).
No, they are too closely tied to gawk (somebody updates gawk, and they breaks happily).
talking to azarah, the reason it's there is because if you upgrade gawk, the possiblity of the filefunc's binary being ABI incompatible is common thus we'd have to force a re-emerge of baselayout to rebuild the filefuncs module
as an in-between ground, could you at least offer the filefuncs as a seperate package as well as being integrated into gawk then? Might the GentooBSD folk also have use for this type of thing, given their BSD awk?
I am working on something else that should be more portable, but do not want to comment at it too much right now. Is it possible to hang on for the moment? I know the fbsd guys at least seems to be able to get gawk and filefuncs.so to work fine ...
