Hi Sebastian,

On 20-03-2011 19:18:54 +0100, darkdefende@... wrote:
> I was thinking about doing a ebuild generator like a "install wizard". What
> I mean with this is that it will have input fields for deps, useflags, where
> to get the sources and how (tarball?/Git?/SVN?...) and the different stages
> in the ebuild (unpack,compile,install...).

Have you considered a 100% automatic ebuild generator?  Based on
heuristics you can come quite far in generating a first shot.  Think of
tools like autoscan, and what brew create[1] for instance do.

> However I aim at making it as simple so that it will basically "ask" you how
> you would build it normally and it will put together an ebuild for you.

What are the questions you envisage to present the user here?

> This will obviously be usefull for beginners or people (perhaps devs?) that
> doesn't use gentoo. It might also come in handy with small projects.
> But that doesn´t mean that I'll not try to make it usefull for larger projects
> as well.

In general, trying to come up with a use-case (or two) helps to get
yourself a focus on what you would like to do, and what not.  A clearly
defined project has multiple advantages for everyone involved.

> An other thing is that I will make the generator independent of the GUI so that
> you can write clients to it in whatever you wish. But I will mainly focus on
> a GTK client first to get it working. After that I will try to make a webapp
> for it as dol-sen on the IRC channel suggested.

How about interaction with an editor, such as Vim?  Would a command-line
based core be acceptable for you?  It would help you to get it accepted
in a broader audience.

> C&C is hugely appreciated to flesh out this proposal.

What language(s) would you like to use to work this thing out?
Perhaps try to fit approaches like Perl's GPAN into your proposal.
Likewise, Python's pypi packages may inspire you how to fully
automatically create an ebuild from just an url.


[1] http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/

Regards,

-- 
Fabian Groffen
Gentoo on a different level