Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: split up media-sound/ category

[Jesús J. Guerrero Botella]

2011/6/27 Zac Medico <zmedico@g.o>:
> On 06/24/2011 12:52 AM, Jesús J. Guerrero Botella wrote:
>> 2011/6/24 Zac Medico <zmedico@g.o>:
>>> On 06/22/2011 11:15 PM, Jesús J. Guerrero Botella wrote:
>>>> Symlinks are clean, and portage has
>>>> always been file-oriented so I see no problem with using them for
>>>> this. All we need is to deference the symlink to find the real name of
>>>> the package and put it in world instead of the symlinked name, so the
>>>> rest of packages won't even need to be retouched to fix the
>>>> dependencies. I don't really know if it's that simple as it sounds,
>>>> but it's an idea.
>>>
>>> For some reason, using symlinks to represent tags seems like an odd
>>> approach to me. I think it would be much more sensible to put them in
>>> metadata.xml or an ebuild variable. If for some reason you want symlinks
>>> representing the tags (I don't know why you would), you can always use a
>>> script to generate symlinks from metadata.xml files.
>>
>> You might not like it, but Gentoo categories have always been
>> directories, not words into metadata.xml. Most portage tools rely on
>> that. Not a strong argument, I know that. But someone used this
>> argument when someone else wanted to put portage into a database
>> instead of an fs-based tree. That was long ago, admittedly, don't know
>> if that conversation ever came up again.
>
> I see, so you want to optimize the tree layout for use with simple shell
> commands. For a shell-friendly alternative to metadata.xml, I suppose
> that we could instead use a plain text file called "tags" in the same
> directory as metadata.xml. If it listed one tag per line, you could use
> a simple shell command like this to search for packages with a specific tag:
>
>   find /usr/portage -name tags | xargs grep <tag name>

I still don't understand why

A) you need to build a project, a glep, whatever the course of action
is, I am bad at bureaucracy.
B) you need to code the solution, to fix What?
C) "ls $PORTDIR/whatever-category" is a command that's way simpler
than the one you posted.

XML seems to be the trend, but we should really think a moment, what's
what we are trying to fix?

We just needed to add some categories or rename them when someone
started this thread, but now, even when we know we are lacking dev
power in some areas we start arguing that the base concept of our OS
(portage) is wrong, and that we should redo it completely by putting
every ebuild into a directory and tagging them. Again, that's not
"port-age". Read on ports:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_Ports

I don't even use tags for my music collections and now I am going to
be forced to use them to operate my OS. We might even end having
something like

<portage>
<ebuild>
.......................
</ebuild>
<ebuild>
.......................
</ebuild>
..
.
.
.
.

</portage>

 :P

Or

<fs>
<dir>boot</dir>
<dir>usr</dir>
<dir>lib</dir>
<dir>home</dir>
</fs>

genpatches could also remove symlink stuff from the kernel, since it's
taking precious memory that could be used for the /proc.xml file. Yes,
feeling sarcastic, but I am really trying to understand what's what we
need to fix today.

-- 
Jesús Guerrero Botella