[gentoo-dev] Portage Team Update

[Alec Warner]

I asked each member of the portage team (minus Marius, whom I did find
on irc) what they were up to in terms of working on things.  Zac
informed me that 2.1.1 would be out of rc status on the 8th and that
users could expect a few new features and many bugfixes.

>From the NEWS file in svn:
* Profiles support use.force, package.use.force, and package.use.mask files.
* New depclean algorithm is much safer than the old one.

You can view the tracker bug[1] for bugfix information.

Zac also informed me that glep 42 nearing the top of his list of "things
to do."

Simon Stelling reports that he is interested in breaking up ebuild.sh
into more manageable and separate chunks in order for easy of
maintenance.  An idea has also popped up of pushing more of ebuild.sh's
code into elib-esque bash libs that are pushed out via the tree; such
that they can be modified easier by developers who can't/won't wait for
releases.  This eases portage maintenance as there is less code to debug
and maintain (and less code to update).

Jason Stubbs reported in; the new depclean implementation in 2.1.1 was
contributed by him.  He also states his plans to improve the resolver;
but also notes real life takes precedence, so there is no time table
presented for these improvements.  Things to fix include better circular
dependency support and using the installed database (vdb) in order to
facilitate correct depgraph creation.

Kito I could not find, news from devrel says he is on the "about to get
retired list"; so kito if you are reading, heads up ;)

With Kito gone, Exg is working on getting a diff of prefix vs trunk so
he can import all these darned features and bugfixes; no one has done a
merge in months.

Ned Ludd is continuously improving portage-utils.  I also hear some
rumors of improved Binpkg support ( -K/-G and friends ) although I have
no more information than that.

Mike Frysinger is still fixing whitespace issues in ebuild.sh :)

Marien Zwart has been without a network connection for a while; he has
no plans for portage.  He currently works on pkgcore with ferringb,
although I imagine ferringb will pummel him into commiting some cpython
listdir enhancements so that portage will run a bit faster.  It all
depends on how thick of a hide Marien has ;)

I technically shouldn't count myself, but I've been working on GLEP 21.
 It's "close" to being done.  I have more issues to work out with it
though, so don't hold your breath.

[1] http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=136244
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