[gentoo-soc] Project proposal - quick package installer

[Ravi Pinjala]

One of my occasional frustrations with Gentoo is that it's more
difficult than it needs to be to install a package from a tarball, and
still have its files tracked by a package manager. The simplest thing
I've found to do is to create an ebuild in my personal overlay and use
that, but not everybody wants/needs to learn how to write ebuilds.

My project idea is a tool to allow users to quickly install packages
from tarballs, or other sources, and have the installed files tracked by
their package manager. Ideally, it should be no more difficult than the
usual "./configure; make; make install" sequence that we're all used to.

One obvious issue with this is dependencies; if packages installed using
this method can be used as dependencies of other packages, it makes it a
lot easier for users to do strange things to their systems. My initial
instinct is to say that packages installed by this method will be
excluded from dependency calculations somehow, but I also think the
option should be there somewhere.

Questions/comments/suggestions? Is this actually a terrible idea, for
reasons I haven't thought of yet? :)

--Ravi