On Wed, 17 Aug 2005, Grobian wrote:

> 
> Kito wrote:
>
[snip]
> > 
> > Now, as far as portage having knowledge about what software is 
> > installed...if it lived in its own prefix, that wouldn't be an issue, 
> > as all package dependencies would be handled and installed by portage, 
> > avoiding linking against OS X system libs as much as possible. This 
> > would make it possible for instance to have /gentoo on say an external 
> > drive that could be mounted and used on virtually any Mac OSX system, 
> > regardless of system updates, etc.
> > 
> > That being said, I feel like the name for such a tool shouldn't be 
> > called 'Gentoo for OS X', as thats a very misleading name which seems 
> > to cause a lot of confusion amongst users and developers alike. A much 
> > more apt title IMHO would be 'Portage for Mac OS X', and leave the 
> > title 'Gentoo for Mac OS X' for the profiles that actually manage 
> > system files.
> 
> Amen!  Couldn't agree more.
> 

If you will humour me, what's the difference? Apart from prefix, what 
distinguishes profiles that manage the host OS and profiles that don't? 
(Given that a profile can change just about every aspect of portage's 
behaviour.)

The reason I ask is this: greedily, I want Kito's /gentoo on an external 
drive, and I also want to chroot into it sometimes [1].

The implication being, 'Portage for Mac OS X' would have to be equivalent 
to 'Gentoo for Mac OS X'.

This idea extrapolates from the original pathspec, which described a 
self-similar directory structure. (I guess the idea was that the ebuilds 
shouldn't have to care.)

Anyway, as someone who doesn't cut any code for this project, I think I 
should stop making outrageous demands now ;-)

-f



[1] This can be done (I learned this trick from Ryan Oliver's Pure LFS 
technique). You install everything prefixed /Volumes/Gentoo, then

mkdir /Volumes/Gentoo/Volumes
ln -s ../.. /Volumes/Gentoo/Volumes/Gentoo
chroot /Volumes/Gentoo

Outside the chroot, /etc/make.profile defines the prefix as 
/Volumes/Gentoo, whilst inside the chroot, /etc/make.profile uses the same 
prefix. The chroot profile may need to be different, if portage is 
expecting Mac OS X here... hence my initial question, "What's the 
difference?"

I'm assuming that any required OS X libraries have been copied to the 
Gentoo volume first, and the psuedo filesystems mounted (as with any 
chroot).
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