Re: [gentoo-dev] Parsable list of all use variables.

[Bob Phan]

On Thu, 9 May 2002, Francisco Gimeno wrote:

> El Jue 09 May 2002 18:06, Bob Phan escribió:
> > I think it would be a good idea for someone (I could do this if no one
> > wants to) to maintain a parsable list of all the use variables, what
> > they are for, and which ebuilds use them.  This would be useful for
> > writing tools that would want to know this information, or even for
> > automatic maintenence of a webpage for use variables.  CSV or XML
> > would be a good format for this.  XML may be overkill, expecially for
> > someone wanting to write a shell script with acess to this
> > information, but XML would also work great for c, perl, python, and
> > web maintenence.
> >
> > I have taken a look at /usr/portage/profiles/use.desc,
> > and while useful for users to read, it is not easily parsable.
> >
> > Any thoughts, suggestions?
>
> and... going on work... we could make the same to the commands of the ebuild
> packages, like dodir, doins, and those... to get them well-documented and in
> an ordered way...

I don't follow?  The goal isn't to make an xml ebuild, as I rather
like them as shell scripts and it lowers the bar a little for people
that wan't to start writing their own.  The design goels for what I
suggested, is basically a way to keep track of all currently used USE
vars.  And basically, three things are important about each.

1) What they are called.
2) What they mean.
3) Which packages use them.

I think it would be a valuable resource to have a maintainable and
parsable list of these.  As it stands, I already have a perl script
that can dig out 1 & 2 and dump them into XML.  I'm going to tidy it
up a bit and probably post it to this group.

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