Re: [gentoo-dev] Ebuild Generators (Was: GSoC 2020: Call for mentors and project ideas)

[Gerion Entrup]

Am Montag, 3. Februar 2020, 05:20:42 CET schrieb Benda Xu:
> Gerion Entrup <gerion.entrup@×××××.de> writes:
>
> > I saw the idea „Big Data Infrastructure by Gentoo“ and found it kind of
> > interesting. However, I have a little bit the fear that a full automation
> > won't be possible and the whole project becomes a little bit like g-sorcery
> > (gs-pypi, gs-elpa) or g-octave: a really cool project but not used at a
> > large scale.
>
> Yes, that's true.  I share the same observation and concern with you.
>
> This is one exception: the CRAN ebuild generator powered R overlay has
> been running well for 8 years.
>
>   https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Science/Overlay/R
Hmm, interesting, thank you.


> > What do you think of the idea to not do this fully automated but supervised
> > by a maintainer? With that I mean an ebuild generator that generates only
> > the parts of the ebuild that it can easily parse and then present the ebuild
> > draft to a maintainer who completes it to an full ebuild. As far a I know no
> > tool like this exists. I think the focus shift helps a lot:
> > Developing a tool for the Gentoo maintainer not the Gentoo user.
>
> Yes, that makes a lot of sense.  The R overlay follows this model.  Most
> of the ebuilds are automated.  When an ebuild generation fails, we add
> the ebuild manually, understand it and then update the generator to
> cover it in the future.
Is this possible in all cases? I think of adding custom patches,
appropriate mapping of dependencies, check for things like desktop icon
cache...


> > I'm only "maintaining" an overlay so maybe I'm  missing experience
> > but I often have wished a tool that automatically parses the language specific
> > packaging files and is able to generate a primitive ebuild out of that.
> > Maybe it even can do this in an interactive way:
> > "Hey, upstream needs the dependency 'foo'. In the Gentoo packages I have found
> > 'dev-bar/foo' and 'dev-util/foo'. What is the correct one?"
>
> Yes, that's the way R overlay is working.  And I have a similar plan and
> proof-of-concept solution for the Java Maven overlay.
Nice to hear. I think, it is meaningful to solve all generation with one
tool. Maybe it can even "recognize" the used build system and package
database. Is this your plan, too?


Best,
Gerion