Re: [gentoo-dev] Glep 49 (g2boojum's version)

[Marius Mauch]

On Fri, 02 Jun 2006 16:17:06 +0000
Ferris McCormick <fmccor@g.o> wrote:

> Grant,
>   Apologies; I can't find your note from yesterday, so I can't respond
> to the correct topic.
>   One question just occurred to me; if it's been addressed before,
> apologies about that, too.  Your requirement that any alternative
> package manager support any ebuild which portage supports seems
> essential, except for a boundary case.  What about ebuilds which for
> whatever reason are invalid (serious specification violation, for
> example, to the extent that QA would reject them), but portage accepts
> them anyway.  Must the alternative accept them as well?  In a case
> like this, it seems to me that the ebuild works because of a bug in
> portage, and there should be no complaint if as a side effect of
> fixing this bug the ebuild in question quit working.
>   If memory serves me, things like this have indeed happened.  I can't
> recall a specific, however.

Actually this is probably the main problem of all the "package manager
compability" gleps: We don't have a proper specification, all existing
docs more or less are based on the existing portage implementation. So
right now the implementation is the authorative specification, which of
course creates some problems.
IMO before any such glep can be considered we need a proper
specification about our package and repository formats, otherwise you
can't really validate any package manager (the statespace is a bit
large for equivalence checks).

Marius

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