Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: drobbins@g.o
To: gentoo-dev@g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] /proc and portage
Date: Sat, 20 Jan 2001 18:14:16
Message-Id: 20010120181416.A6798@cvs.gentoo.org
In Reply to: [gentoo-dev] /proc and portage by Thomas Flavel
1 On Fri, Jan 19, 2001 at 09:47:15AM +0000, Thomas Flavel wrote:
2 > Hi,
3 >
4 > I had an idea I dimsmissed which I thought I should post anyway, on the off chance that it
5 > might actually get used ;)
6 >
7 > I was thinking about how /proc is sometimes used as a bi-directional interface, for example I
8 > can "echo 1>/proc/whatever" to turn on ping flood protection or something similar. I was
9 > wondering how practical it would be to have a similar thing for portage?
10 >
11 > If I could say "echo gimp>/proc/portage/install" or "cat /proc/portage/packages" etc then
12 > this would mean that it would be very easy to write front ends for portage, plus with this
13 > minimal interface it would be very nice to use in scripts... I know it would be a massive
14 > kernel module, and probably too much effort to actually produce/maintain but I thought you
15 > should hear the idea... have a think about it please
16
17 Well, even if we want to implement something like this, it shouldn't go in
18 /proc, and we don't need a kernel patch. It's fully possible to do things like
19 this in user space with directories residing in /var.
20
21 We do need some kind of robust portage interface, and something like this could
22 work. Specifically, I can think of something like a revamped portage download
23 manager scanning the /var/lib/portage/download directory for new files that it
24 should download. That would also allow the download manager to "double up" on
25 downloads if more than one file needed to be downloaded at the same time.
26 However, the actual build process is more linear, and I don't know if there
27 would be much benefit from this approach besides creating a standardized
28 interface. I'll keep it in mind for the next revision of Portage.
29
30 Best Regards,
31
32 --
33 Daniel Robbins <drobbins@g.o>
34 President/CEO http://www.gentoo.org
35 Gentoo Technologies, Inc.