Howto ebuild interactive ebuilds?

Thiemo · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 20 Nov 2002 Posts: 128

Hi,

is it possible to make an ebuild of software that has got an interactive install process? I am thinking of making an ebuild for arkeia, but their install process states that their ./install does everything itself but it asks questions about where to install and such. As I won't re-invent the wheel and make a whole new install process, I'd like to know if it is possible to have interactive emerges and if so if it is bad style?

Cheers

Thiemo
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Pythonhead · Posted: Mon Jun 02, 2003 7:26 pm Post subject:

There isn't much you can do about it, as far as 'bad style' goes because ebuilds are based on the original source files.

Come to think of it, the vmware one has an interactive config, if I recall correctly.

From the pkg_postinst() function:

panserg · Apprentice Joined: 16 Apr 2003 Posts: 188

If it's tty-based dialog, then you may re-direct "answers" to stdin of the dialog process. Of course, if the installer is based on ncurses or X11 then it's not that easy and/or it's very buggy.

Another way is to install the "installer" it into a temp area and than run "ebuild your_package_version.ebuild config" where "config" target will run an interactive "installer" asking questions and installing the package finally to user-chosen location. This way is bad as you won't be able to uninstall properly: emerge doesn't know final file paths. You should use it only in case if it's impossible to install without GUI/curses-based installer.

The best way is to avoid such programs, which seems are written by MS-Windows-addicted programmers, I think.