Re: [gentoo-dev] extend profiles.desc to include "experimental" profiles

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Fri, 2008-01-11 at 09:59 -0500, Doug Klima wrote:
> Mike Frysinger wrote:
> > after dealing with m68k, mips, and the *-fbsd ports, i think we could do with
> > a new state for profiles.desc.  the new field would simply be "exp" to
> > indicate that the profile is experimental and that qa tools should generally
> > not issue warnings about them.  so in repoman's default mode, you wouldnt get
> > any warnings, but if you were to run it in full mode, you'd see stuff like
> > normal.  this is useful for new projects which are still in the process of
> > merging (like *-fbsd, m68k, and any new hardware i get my hands on) and are
> > not really ready for "dev" marking.  there are plenty of warnings in packages
> > right now due to these profiles being labeled as "dev" that are the sole
> > problem of the keyword maintainer in question and not the package maintainer.
> > -mike
> >
> I've very much been a proponent of properly listing out all of our
> profiles in profiles.desc. This sounds very reasonable and logical. And
> hopefully if the tools in question are coded properly, it should be
> compatible with older versions until users upgrade.

To go along with this, I've always wanted a few other minor changes.

For one, a way to mark a profile as deprecated in profiles.desc so
repoman doesn't scan it (currently, we remove tend to remove them from
the list).  The second would be a change to repoman that's more
"invasive" in that it changes current behavior a good bit, but having
repoman only scan "stable" profiles, by default, with options to scan
the other types.  I've always wanted to have *every* valid profile
listed in profiles.desc so we can do things like have portage not allow
someone to use a profile that isn't listed in profiles.desc (of course,
overlay users crazy enough could do their own profiles.desc and it would
be stacked with the in-tree one).  The main problem with doing this has
been the effect on repoman, since it scans every listed profile every
time.  I know that most of the profile selection tools out there already
only show profiles that are listed in profiles.desc, so it wouldn't
really be a change for them, but I think it would be useful elsewhere,
too.  All in all, having profiles.desc actually showing the status of
all of the profiles would be great.

> Good stuff Mike.

Indeed.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Games Developer