On Fri, 2004-04-02 at 02:53, Paul de Vrieze wrote:
> > Why does everyone always say "like games" anyway?  Games are
> > essential, man.  KDE and Gnome are cruft... ;p
> 
> Well for servers games are even less usefull than kde/gnome, allthough 
> both of them don't have a place on most servers either.

Except for servers servicing items from games-server... :]

Anyway, for now it is much simpler to have a tree of ebuilds which are
easily maintainable than a single (or a few) large xml files which would
become a maintenance nightmare for all the developers involved. 
Currently there are many developers who work on only one ebuild in a
particular area.  As a good example, I maintain exactly one ebuild in
app-emulation.  What kind of separation would there be for the xml
files?  How would different versions be accommodated?  Unless there was
some "magic" which translated the text ebuilds/eclasses/profiles into
xml (or a db, or whatever) before it went out to the world, and which
*didn't screw up* in the process, I don't think we'd see much of a
change any time soon.  Not to mention the amount of work that would need
to be done to portage itself to modify it to parse xml.  I know that
this sort of thing has been discussed before, and if memory serves me
correctly, the reason for not doing so was not so much it being a bad
idea or anything but really a matter of developer resources and
energies.  There's really nothing wrong with the current approach that
would be helped by having the portage tree be in xml or a database, at
least, not anything worth spending the tremendous amount of resources on
that it would take.  Personally, I would rather spend my time fixing
bugs and adding new features to portage, not redoing all of the work I
have done up until now to make it xml compliant.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Developer, Gentoo Linux
Games Team

Is your power animal a pengiun?