Re: [gentoo-dev] Portage database/struct documents

[Meir Kriheli]

On Thursday 20 June 2002 21:13, Daniel Robbins wrote:
> On Thu, 2002-06-20 at 09:54, Meir Kriheli wrote:
> > Is the a document/summary/resource which describes portage's database
> > (files used, directories, syntax inside the files) ?
> >
> > One that not, what happend to the plans to build portage based on
> > firebird/tiny-qt ?
> >
> > I've seen a doc about it in the past, but can't locate it anymore.
> > Discontinued ?
>
> Yes; we won't be adding the high-speed database option until later.  Our
> immediate priority is to optimize our existing algorithms and techniques
> and enhance Portage functionality to provide better QA tools to our
> developers.  Since this requires continual changes to our sources, it
> wouldn't make sense to move to a compiled language at this point either.
>
> There is no official documentation on the portage db stuff yet, but
> there is some that is going to be appearing soon -- the new db api in
> Portage 2.0.2 is maturing nicely.
>
> Best Regards,

OK, I see. The reasons I've asked this is the in the coming month (I hope so), 
we're gonna start a binary distro and want to base it on gentoo (all the main 
developers use it and love it).

The distro is targeted towards new users and be binary based (tbz2 packages). 
When and if the users get knowledgeable the can switch to lower level gentoo 
as is used today without the need to reinstall.

We need to add i18n capabilities to portage, which includes description of 
packages in other languages (and more detailed the one that is there now), 
and the option to search on that description in the native language (not just 
by package name, but by the description as well).

We also intend to write to frontends to configure the system and an installer 
(i18n as well).

That's the reason I've asked about tiny-qt as well (Unicode/charset conversion 
handling).

There are 2 ways to do it:

(a) write a frontend to emerge (CLI or GUI) which holds it's own database of 
descriptions (and falls back to emerge -s if no i18n found), downloads the 
binaries (if not present on the CD) and calls emerge --usepkg to install them

(b) implement it somehow into the portage DB and enhance emerge/ebuild/qpkg.

I prefer take option (b) as this will benefit Gentoo as well and bring even 
more users towards it.

Option (a) would be messier to implement and no one else will benefit from it.

I'd love to hear your ideas/flames/suggestions.
-- 
Meir Kriheli