[gentoo-dev] portage-ng concurse entry Was: Updated Portage project page

[George Shapovalov]

Sorry for the crosspost, but it looks like this topic is approximately 
equivalently active on either lis, and I did not find the "submission 
instructions" perhaps because its not yet time for design submits :)..

On Wednesday 03 December 2003 15:08, Daniel Robbins wrote:
> I haven't looked at twisted, but a good solution suggested by nerdboy is
> to have a design competition once we have the requirements finalized.

So, we are going to do it according to "accepted practices" :).
Seriously, I am glad to see it! And here is my entry ;).

Well, this really is a proposal of the language to use for core stuff, not as 
much of a design. Ever since the implementation in Prolog was mentioned I was 
keeping some thoughts on the backburner and finally I decided to do a 
competing entry, for the reason's I'll try to outline.

I have them nicely wrapped up here:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~george/portage-ng_core-proposal.html

To reiterate them shortly, Prolog is a really esoteric language and I am not 
sure we will be able to find enough people to feel comfortable about having 
the very core of portage-ng implemented in it. Also there might be issues of 
portability and efficiency..

On the other hand I understand the desire to stay clear off the C/C++ use and 
completely support it. Therefore I propose a middle-ground solution, to use a 
common compiled procedural language that was designed to enhance readability, 
modularization and ease maintaince of a large system. Oh, it is also very 
portable and widely awailable and is alive and well supported.
What else? It took me only about two weeks (of like 1-2 hrs per day of 
reading) to get into it and sturt crunching out some code when I decided to 
learn it :).. (not Hellow World, but real code, mind you).

But read-on for the details..

However that's not all. I have produced some basic prototyping code to 
illustrate what could be expected. The prototype is quite crude, as I did 
this during relatively rare breaks from writing an article (completely 
unrelated to CS :)), but it should serve the purpose. Did I say the code 
shoul be readable? So, even though I do not expect many people to be familiar 
with that language I would still suggest trying to look at the code. You are 
in for a one nice surprise ;).
(I am not revealing the name of language in this posting deliberately, because 
I want people to read through arguments first).

The code is available here:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~george/proto_portage-0.7.5.tar.bz2
but you will probably want to read the text before that.

In any case, if you want to jump in, just a short install instruction:
run  "emerge gnat booch_components "
then untar the package and run make
Although reading INSTALL that comes with the package might be usefull too ;)
(it has some details in case you experience problems).

George



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