Linux Desktop needs less commercialism
Linux Desktop needs less commercialism
Posted Jun 3, 2005 15:08 UTC (Fri) by zakaelri (guest, #17928)In reply to: Linux Desktop needs less commercialism by ranger
Parent article: What the Linux Desktop Needs (OS Views)
What the Gentoo devs do for proprietary packages is write an encapsulating ebuild, not rewrite the application itself.
Portage determines dependencies, & installs them. After that, they use the original installer to place the files in a "sandbox". At this point, they can swap in their own platform specific config files and do whatever else they need to prep the install. Then they merge the sandbox with the current filesystem.
They provide ebuilds for several proprietary apps (particularly games), and they all work this way. To name a few: sun-java, blackdown, ut2k4, point2play, & neverwinter nights (along with wine-nwn).