Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Interaction in ebuilds - bad idea?

[Paul de Vrieze]

On Saturday 01 May 2004 02:33, Stuart Herbert wrote:
> On Saturday 01 May 2004 01:13, Grant Goodyear wrote:
> > Oh, dear.  I'm afraid I wasn't very clear about what I meant.  I didn't
> > mean that it's hard to write an interactive script, of course that's
> > reasonably straightforward.  What I was trying, rather poorly, to say
> > was that one of the long-time tenets of Gentoo has always been that it
> > should be possible for people to write simple scripts to _install_
> > ebuilds.  For example, somebody should be able to write a poor-man's
> > "kickstart" that would build and install a desired set of ebuilds,
> > perhaps with customized USE flags.  Or use cfengine to install a
> > particular well-tested ebuild on one hundred machines.  To the best of
> > my knowledge having interactive ebuilds would make _that_ sort of
> > scripting much more difficult.
> >
> > Does that make more sense?
>
> Yup.
>
> Like I said, it would only have to ask for information that wasn't
> available from the cache of answers.  Provided there was a tool to pre-edit
> the cache - something I suggested earlier - then your scenarios would work.

I agree with such a setup. Have a way in which - optionally - the ebuild can 
be preconfigured. This configuration would need to be selfcontained in such a 
way that the configuration files can be copied and created at any time. 

Paul

ps. Besides this I feel the need to allow per-ebuild descriptions on useflags. 
Those descriptions would describe what the consequences of the useflags are. 
Like for subversion the berkdb useflag signifies whether the server part gets 
build (because berkdb is needed for that), it would be very usefull to have 
some easilly accessible description for it.

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@g.o
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net