On Fri, 2006-05-12 at 16:05 -0700, Nimish Pachapurkar wrote:
> Hello All,
> 
> I have been fiddling with Portage for a few weeks now. Recently, I was
> trying to get the RPM creation with ebuild to work a little better. I
> noticed that currently emerge does not support building RPMs, but ebuild
> does.
> 
> I have added some code to emerge that can build RPM for a package and 
> all its dependencies. It will optionally merge the package to the system 
> or just build an RPM. I am basically making this work very similar to 
> the --buildpkg and --buildpkgonly options.
> 
> I am using --buildrpm (-r) and --buildrpmonly (-R) options currently for 
> these two tasks. However, if those two short options are reserved for 
> some other purpose, I am fine with changing them. (If so, please suggest 
> different short options).
> 
> If this functionality is likely to be useful to other people also, I 
> would love to submit a patch.
> 
> I think I have somewhat older version of portage. Which version should I 
> build the patch against, if I have to?


2.1 is in a feature freeze right now. Everybody is trying to tidy up 
existing functionality in preparation for 2006.1 But that would of
otherwise been the branch of seen it committed to. probably best to 
give it a few weeks and revisit.

rpm support however needs more than a few emerge switches. The existing
package itself of rpm in the tree has a few problems and really needs a
maintainer. Also portage's auto spec generation is on the side of far
to basic to really be useful.

A while ago a user Peter S. Mazinger <ps.m@...> and myself
discussed in semi detail a lot of the problems surrounding rpm support
and later he sent me some patches that interpolated nicely with the 
existing rpm based distros. I mirrored those patches and they are 
all tagged with the names of the portage-rpm-*.patch
http://dev.gentoo.org/~solar/patch_overlay/sys-apps/portage/

You may find some of those patches inspirational to your work.

good luck. 

-- 
Ned Ludd <solar@g.o>
Gentoo Linux

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