[gentoo-osx] prefix ebuild's api suggestion

[Michael Haubenwallner]

Hi,

when talking to a colleague of mine (he's using Gentoo-Linux, and wants
to use prefixed portage), an idea for the prefix-api came up:

Currently, there's the PREFIX variable (among others) for the ebuilds.

The idea is to substitute this with a bash-function, echoing a prefix.

This function could be defined to get one argument, which is much like
the same syntax as the *DEPEND settings, but only for a single package.
If no argument, the current package is used.

Yes, the current implementation would be simple:
    prefix() {
        echo $PREFIX
    }

But the idea behind that is:

Once portage could handle interdomain dependencies, the prefix-api need
not to be changed to let ebuilds find the prefix of their dependencies.

A sample ebuild-snippet:

DEPEND="<my-dependency-2"

econf-or-src_build() {
    .../configure \
        --prefix=$(prefix) \
        --with-my-dependency=$(prefix "<my-dependency-2")
}

Another possible feature in the future (not finished thinking about yet)
could be to have portage install each (non-system-)package into a
separate prefix within its domain, without need to change prefix-api.
This could help ebuild-devs to detect unknown dependencies, which are
not found implicitly if not specified at configure-line.
Well - only for a testing system, and to be enabled explicitly
by setting FEATURES.

What do you think about this ?

-haubi

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