Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev <gentoo-dev@l.g.o>
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: GLEP 64: Standardize contents of VDB and establish and API for exporting this information.
Date: Sun, 31 Aug 2014 15:53:48
Message-Id: CAGfcS_mawQvg0Ec91i0XFRdPOQZ7P3XHBpHXK46MaB0q41XRrQ@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: GLEP 64: Standardize contents of VDB and establish and API for exporting this information. by "Anthony G. Basile"
1 On Sun, Aug 31, 2014 at 11:08 AM, Anthony G. Basile <blueness@g.o> wrote:
2 >
3 > I do not understand why you oppose the standardization of VDB?
4 >
5
6 I think it would make sense to take a step back.
7
8 What is it that you're actually after here? You want to be able to
9 determine information about packages that are installed. So, just
10 determine what information is required and define an API for providing
11 this information. I'd focus on software/script-friendliness first and
12 foremost - then people can write as many wrappers around it as they
13 like.
14
15 How the package manager determines this information is not the
16 problem. If the package manager wants to run ldd against all the
17 binaries installed by the package and then recompile every ebuild in
18 the tree to see if there is a match, that is its own problem.
19
20 Just focus on the interface, and trust those implementing the package
21 manager to do it in a competent fashion. If they don't then users
22 probably won't use the package manager if they care about those
23 features. Or maybe users care more about a few kilobytes of indexes
24 and would prefer that the package manager not store information which
25 it could re-derive, and that is perfectly fine as well.
26
27 And yes, I realize we're talking about how to accomplish something
28 before we've decided whether to accomplish it. I think that for any
29 reasonable decision to be made about the latter it doesn't hurt to
30 have at least some sense of what the former is going to look like,
31 though not necessarily the detail of a full specification. It
32 wouldn't hurt to point out use cases too. This is a GLEP, so nobody
33 has to do anything unless the Council approves it...
34
35 --
36 Rich

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