On 2007.12.15 06:46, Steve Long wrote:
> Just a quick post re something that was raised in the council 
> meeting.
> 

Steve,

The offical package manager is portage. If another package manager does 
something different to portage - even if it fixes a bug in portage, by 
definition, its not compliant.

The exisiting PMS have been arrived at by documenting what portage 
does, which is itself a moving target.
No PMS is likely to be endorsed until Portage stays still long enough 
to document it, check it and ratifiy it, unless some arbitary portage 
version is chosen to document.

Any such PMS won't be very useful, as portage will have moved on 
meanwhile. A PMS will only be useful when its adopted and maintained by 
the portage devs, when portage will become a reference inplementaion of 
the spec. I don't see that happening, since they don't need such a 
document. 

It reminds me of AMD, Cyrix and others trying to produce a x86 CPU 
clone. Most got close but not close enough as they failed to reproduce 
the bugs in the silicon that were in some cases needed for normal 
operation. AMD persisted and got a reasonable market share. Intel 
didn't make it easy, releasing new CPUs from time to time.

At least developers wanting a PMS can read the portage source code to 
see what it does.

Regards,

Roy Bamford
(NeddySeagoon)
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