Re: [gentoo-dev] new glep draft: Portage as a secondary package manager

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Mon, 2 May 2005 19:02:29 -0500 Brian Harring <ferringb@g.o>
wrote:
| State said problem for the general community.  Guessing you're 
| referencing the issue/request that being able to manage home, and 
| 'global' installations?
| 
| I'd still posit that the issue of installing to a user's home when 
| portage's base prefix is /usr/local (fex) is a seperate issue.  What 
| you were requesting for vim plugins goes beyond haubi's initial 
| goals...

Ok, here's the main issue. Simply changing prefix isn't enough to
automatically make every package in the tree work. A heck of a lot of
them will need manual modification, and there's no easy way to figure
out which these are. So...

My suggested way around this was to have a variable in ebuilds. Call it
something like ICANINSTALLTO (that name sucks, come up with something
better), which defaults to ICANINSTALLTO="usr". Ebuilds which have been
explicitly checked and designed by the maintainer for prefix installs
get ICANINSTALLTO="usr prefix".

This also allows us to do other cool stuff like ICANINSTALLTO="home",
for things like vim and gkrellm plugins which can go in ~/.vim/ and
~/.gkrellm2/plugins/ respectively.

Thing is, if we introduce the PREFIX feature, people will expect it to
actually work. It won't, at least not straight away, because there are
so many ebuilds that use more than econf to get the prefix figured out.
By whitelisting we can at least display a nice "you can't install this
package in a prefix" message.

Another issue... Portage installs to /usr/local are no good, because
there might be other non-portage installs there too. If we're installing
to a prefix, we have to be the *only* thing installing there. No other
packages, not even other manual installs.

Yet another issue... As it stands, all deps must be installed into the
given PREFIX. This is messy. Is there a way around this? This would be
less of a problem with ICANINSTALLTO="home" -- presumably for these
portage could pass a var to the ebuild telling it in which prefix to
look for its deps.

That'll do for now. I'll shoot some more holes in it once these have
been figured out.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Vim, Shell tools, Fluxbox, Cron)
Mail            : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web             : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm