Re: [gentoo-dev] GLEP 22: New "keyword" system to incorporate various userlands/kernels/archs

[Paul de Vrieze]

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On Wednesday 17 March 2004 01:31, Olivier Crête wrote:
> If we want to support a very large number of hardware/software
> combinations we have to either decide that we want to keep the same

I don't see this as much as a problem. Supporting many hardware software 
combinations is hard in general. Even a very widely supported package 
like gcc does not support more than two dozen configurations. Each 
package must be checked for every configuration any way. What might be 
an option is to have some level of hinting. Say have the x86-linux flag 
mean that it will probably work on x86 machines and that it will 
probably work on linux machines. Adding something like :sunos: (a hint 
between colons) would then automatically mark this package as testing 
under solaris-x86. If that package then builds on sparc-linux it is also 
likely to work on sparc-solaris etc. It would allow testing to be more 
flexible, while still having the same requirements for stability. 

Say if for each of the 5 dimensions there are 3 choices, that would 
allready lead to 3^5=243 combinations. There is no way in which we can 
suppor that even with more liberal keywords.

For hinting we also might have flags like -bigendian signalling that it 
only works on litleendian cpu's etc.

So basically I'm at the position that we only want multipart keywords. 
Multiple variables will not be really testeable and destroy the little 
QA we have at the moment.

Paul

- -- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@g.o
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net
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