On 01/28/2010 09:24 PM, Max Arnold wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 28, 2010 at 04:17:41PM +0100, Beber wrote:
>> So, do you guys plan to implement a such thing ? That's one of the
>> features that is mostly missing imho. The principal miss in on client
>> side as I have tools to manage packages but would like to not have too
>> much specific scripts on client side.
> 
> I like the way it done in OpenEmbedded. You have the tree of recipes (think of portage tree)
> and bunch of targets. For each target BitBake can generate binary release and package feed.
> Client package management is lightweight and does not require BitBake, recipes tree and even
> python. At least this is my lame interpretation of how it works :)

You can do something similar using the emerge --config-root option.
You'd just use a different --config-root for each target, and each
of those would have a separate $PKGDIR.

> Maybe this "metadistribution" approach is cleaner than binary package support in emerge. If
> user wants to compile packages on the client, he uses portage. If not - he can setup build
> server for multiple targets and completely drop portage from client machines. The only thing
> client should know is feed url with full list of binary packages. And I do not think client
> should deal with USE flags - for large installations unification is the only sane way to scale.

The clients need sys-apps/portage installed, but not the whole
portage tree (although the profiles directory can be useful for
the profile and package moves). The clients should set
PORTAGE_BINHOST in make.conf, so that binary packages are
automatically downloaded with the emerge -g option.
-- 
Thanks,
Zac