Re: [gentoo-dev] rfc: location of portage tree

[Brian Dolbec]

On Wed, 2012-03-28 at 08:25 +1300, Kent Fredric wrote:
> On 28 March 2012 08:05, William Hubbs <williamh@g.o> wrote:
> > All,
> >
> > I know this has come up before, but I don't really recall what the
> > specific objections were.
> >
> > IMO the portage directory doesn't belong under /usr at all.
> > I was chatting with another developer who uses
> > /var/cache/portage/{tree,distfiles}, and I'm thinking about switching my
> > default setup to do this.
> >
> > I realize that historically the portage tree has been installed under
> > /usr, but Can we consider changing this default for new installations
> > and providing instructions for users for how to get the portage tree out
> > of /usr?
> > William
> >
>
> I think I'd rather something closer to paludis's notion, don't assume
> its "portage", assume its a repository instead.
>
>
> /var/cache/repositories/gentoo/*
> /var/cache/repositories/perl-experimental/*
> /var/cache/distfiles/*
> /var/cache/packages/*
>
> Or something along those lines. ( And definitely with the default
> locations for distfiles and pkg's outside the repository tree instead
> of inside it )
>

I am very much in favor of moving all overlays and the main tree into a
common repos, or repositories directory in /var somewhere, maybe even
just /var/repos/gentoo, /var/repos/sunrise,... I see no need to put them
under cache/, etc.. Although under /var/db/ would be the one I'd prefer
from the choices.  

 Layman currently uses /var/lib/layman/overlay-name.  It would be best I
feel to place them in one common location.  I also feel the main tree
should be stored as the same name as it's repo_name value.

If it is done in some fashion like that.  The package managers could
also be modified to automatically scan the base directory for valid
repositories without the need to have them specifically configured in
make.conf. Not to say that they cannot be set in make.conf, but would be
required for anything outside of that base dir.

While we're discussing repos location and naming in general, I recently
came upon a layman overlay (via bug 408897) that is listed as haskell in
layman, but it's repo_name value is gentoo-haskell.  This was for the
glep 42 news reporting feature I just added to layman-2.0.  I had to
patch layman to get around this issue of the mismatched names by getting
the correct name from portage which is needed for the portage
news-reporting function that layman will do after an add/sync
operation. 

Is this something we should specify for them to match?
My thinking is that they should, at the very least, for consistency.

-- 
Brian Dolbec <dolsen@g.o>