[gentoo-dev] Yet another few ideas for Portage

Hey all,

This is just a few ideas I've been bouncing around some of the ops on
#gentoo. This is what I have so far:

- "I depend on X package with Y USE flag" functionality. Think of
  problems with packages that need certain support in imlib, and the
  mozilla/epiphany problem. It's a long way off because new syntax would
  be needed, and as Genone told me, "new syntax -> new problems -> more
  testing" :)

- portage.cflags. As most know, some packages perform better with some
  CFLAGS. This might create problems in the sense that people will just
  filter out bad flags here, instead of posting them in bugzilla so they
  can be filtered by the ebuild itself. Still, it's an idea :)

- equery shorthand options. If equery is scheduled to replace qpkg and
  etcat, I really think it needs to have short (-x) style options for
  its actions, for the sake of making it slightly quicker. Typing out
  "-b" instead of "belongs" makes a big difference.. of course, this
  might conflict or complicate the syntax as it stands. Maybe shortening
  the commands to single letters without a preceding hyphen would be
  better?

- equery could do multiple commands on one line. Because the syntax is
  already clearly defined (equery global-opts command local-opts
  pkgspec), surely this could be extended to do more complex things,
  like equery global-opts command1 local-opts1 pkgspec1 command2
  local-opts2 pkgspec2 and so on. On top of this, there could be an
  option to load commands from a file like sed or awk, without having to
  do something like "equery `cat /some/equery-script`".

I'm not sure if these are worth filing enh bugs about, so I'd like it if
people could let me know of any opinions on these.


Thanks,
Tom

-- 
Tom Martin

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