[gentoo-dev] CVS versions and portage management

[marco mascherpa (aka mush)]

hi,
it's the first time i write to this ML, altough i've been subscribed for a 
while. i'm an italian guy, i'm studying information engineering in milan and i'm 
a happy linux user. :) at the moment i'm enjoying a slackware, but some months 
ago i found this gentoo and i think it's really awesome! it merges the goods of 
both linux and BSD which i appreciate too! so i thought this is a great project 
and i'm planning to join you developers as soon as my skills will permit it and 
i will know enough of gentoo to avoid those RTFM questions. :)

now, let's go to the meat: last night i happened to install the CVS version of 
gaim (the open source AIM clone) and suddenly i wondered how could gentoo 
portage system manage the install/upgrade process of a CVS snapshot of an 
application. it could seem a weird situation, why would we need to install the 
CVS snapshot when we have the official releases? as you know better than me 
sometimes some features we need are available only in the CVS version: for 
example licq CVS version is perfectly compatible with the latest ICQ protocol, 
but the official release isn't. but there are much more interesting cases than 
this one, i guess :)

AFAIK the portege system cannot manage the CVS version of an app and decide, for 
instance whether the version we are considering is older or newer than the 
installed one: i can't upgrade a program with his CVS version.

i found two possible solutions to this problem:
- we could make a separate ebuild for every pregram: let's say we have the 
ebuild of program foo, version 1.2.3: we have a foo-1.2.3-r1.ebuild for the 
official release and a fooCVS-20020528-r1.ebuild for the CVS version. this would 
lead to some coexistence inssues but it would be very easy to do and wouldn't 
require any changes in the portage system.
- otherwise we could include in the ebuild a DATE variable wich will contain the 
release date for official releases and the date of the CVS snapshot for CVS 
versions. obviously this would mean some changes in the way upgrade and 
dependencies are managed, but i think it wouldn't be too hard to implement.

i hope my thoughts will be useful in some way and again i congratulate you for 
the optimum job you have made so far.
best regards
	marco

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