Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] New GLEP: file installation masks

[Daniel Campbell]

On 05/20/2016 07:01 AM, Michał Górny wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Sometime around a year ago, I started working on extending INSTALL_MASK
> to support well-defined locations. The work was never finished, and I
> just found my old specification for it. I've cleaned it up a bit,
> and extended it into a complete GLEP covering INSTALL_MASK [1].
>
> Please review the specification provided. The basic goal is to provide
> an ability to use INSTALL_MASK alike USE flags -- with path groups that
> are well-defined and described in the repository.
>
> [1]:https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/User:MGorny/GLEP:INSTALL_MASK
>
I'm totally in favor of this. The '@' prefix idea from your other mail
makes sense, too. Having the repo config file in addition to a custom
/etc/portage/install.mask file (for creating your own groups) is the
most robust way to do this imo. How would we handle namespace clashes,
though? For example, let's say the repo has this:

[bash-completion]
path=/usr/share/bash-completion/*
desc=bash completion files

...and the user has this in their install.mask file:

[bash-completion]
path=/some/other/path
desc=some other description

...then their make.conf has INSTALL_MASK="-@bash-completion" or something.

Should the package manager add the user-supplied path to the existing
"bash-completion" mask group? Should it output an error? Prefix every
group name in the user's install.mask with "user_"?

Otherwise this is a fantastic idea. I'm new to hacking on Portage but if
you have the time and/or patience I'd like to take part in hacking on this.

-- 
Daniel Campbell - Gentoo Developer
OpenPGP Key: 0x1EA055D6 @ hkp://keys.gnupg.net
fpr: AE03 9064 AE00 053C 270C  1DE4 6F7A 9091 1EA0 55D6