Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Paul de Vrieze <pauldv@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] Do I really need the tree?
Date: Fri, 02 Apr 2004 19:14:30
Message-Id: 200404022114.25479.pauldv@gentoo.org
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] Do I really need the tree? by Chris Gianelloni
1 On Friday 02 April 2004 20:43, Chris Gianelloni wrote:
2 > Anyway, for now it is much simpler to have a tree of ebuilds which are
3 > easily maintainable than a single (or a few) large xml files which would
4 > become a maintenance nightmare for all the developers involved.
5 > Currently there are many developers who work on only one ebuild in a
6 > particular area. As a good example, I maintain exactly one ebuild in
7 > app-emulation. What kind of separation would there be for the xml
8 > files? How would different versions be accommodated? Unless there was
9 > some "magic" which translated the text ebuilds/eclasses/profiles into
10 > xml (or a db, or whatever) before it went out to the world, and which
11 > *didn't screw up* in the process, I don't think we'd see much of a
12 > change any time soon. Not to mention the amount of work that would need
13 > to be done to portage itself to modify it to parse xml. I know that
14 > this sort of thing has been discussed before, and if memory serves me
15 > correctly, the reason for not doing so was not so much it being a bad
16 > idea or anything but really a matter of developer resources and
17 > energies. There's really nothing wrong with the current approach that
18 > would be helped by having the portage tree be in xml or a database, at
19 > least, not anything worth spending the tremendous amount of resources on
20 > that it would take. Personally, I would rather spend my time fixing
21 > bugs and adding new features to portage, not redoing all of the work I
22 > have done up until now to make it xml compliant.
23
24 I agree. The only feasible option that could have some benefit (which doesn't
25 mean I support it) is to make ebuild files selfcontained. There would be some
26 benefits in that, but there is a lot that is more important than even
27 considering that option.
28
29 Paul
30
31 --
32 Paul de Vrieze
33 Gentoo Developer
34 Mail: pauldv@g.o
35 Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net