Re: stupid newbie question about source directory structure

[Jonathan Larmour <jifl at eCosCentric dot com>]

Eric Smith wrote:
> Even after reading the eCos Component Writer's Guide, I'm still
> confused about the utility of package versioning.  It seems to me
> that having a version as the name of a directory in the path causes
> more problems and confusion that it solves.  For instance, it makes
> applying patches difficult.  I've resorted to doing this:
>
> for f in `find . -name v2_0b1`; do echo ln -s $f `dirname $f`/current; done
>
> Am I overlooking some clever tricks to avoid the need for this?

I think you just did them ;-).

> On other operating systems I've used, it was certainly possible to select
> between versions of components, but you could only install one at a time
> (unless you wanted to manage symlinks yourself), and I never had any
> problem with that.  Is the eCos way really that much of a win?

It's part of the design so far.... it's long been hoped that we would have 
 a proper package management utility, so that multiple versions of 
packages could be installed alongside each other. Such a tool would do the 
patch management as well.

As ever it's one of the things that's wanted to be done "soon", but we're 
actually more optimistic this time that it could well be done (or at least 
started) for eCos 2.1.

Jifl
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