Re: [gentoo-dev] additional files in portage tree

[Dan Armak]

On Wednesday 08 August 2001 20:25, you wrote:
> Hi Ben!
>
> * Ben Lutgens assembled some ascibets to say:
> Ben >Hi all, I am proposing we add a new file to the portage tree
> directories. I Ben >was thinking something like the pkg_descr files in
> freebsd ports. It could Ben >have a slightly more detailed description, the
> install process ( from the Ben >portage point of view ) as well as homepage
> and ftp urls and possibly a Ben >brief gentoo-changelog. It could look
> something like this.
> Ben >I just think it'd be nice to have a file that we can less to find out
> what Ben >a package is, sometimes the name isn't enough as I can't possibly
> keep Ben >straight everything and the DESCRIPTION in the ebuild isn't great
> since Ben >noone wants to clutter everything up.
> Ben >
> Ben >I'm also not suggesting we take the next 3 months to write these for
> the Ben >existing packages, just adding them for new ones or possibly when
> updating.
>
> I'm all for it.
>
> also it would be nice if it could be interactive in way that when :
>
> emerge foo.ebuild
> it shows the pkg_descr()
> thenruns the emerge --pretend foo.ebuild
> and then asks the user whether to go ahead or not ?
>
> and the user can bypass the interactivity by passing one more parameter as
> : emerge --nopretend foo.ebuild
What you want is reverse the default value of pretend emerges (i.e. pretend 
by default) and of interactiveness (which is currently non-existent, but by 
your system  a user would have to confirm building after running emerge). 
IMHO, and as a personal opinion, I like things better the way they are now. 
But if it comes to that I suppose this can be made configurable easily enough.

As for the description files: I think there'll always be large blanks and 
ebuilds without descriptions. The important thing will be to remember that 
there were no descriptions and now there are some. New users might fall to 
thinking there are "supposed" to be descriptions but usually aren't, and 
psychologically that's a worse impression than no descriptions at all. I 
don't know how true-to-life I'm picturing the users here :-)
Except for that it obviously can only help, so let's go ahead with it!


-- 

Dan Armak
Gentoo Linux Developer, Desktop Team
Matan, Israel