[gentoo-dev] Dan: about your version question

[DDavies]

Hi, Dan

Well Ive been around here quite a long time, and I can fill you in on
a couple details.

FIrst of all, Daniel has noted that he plans to re-implement the download
system.  I have personally made the case here in the past (we're talking
like 4 months ago now) for lukemftp to be incorporated into the
download system.  The portage fetch subsystem totally needs
rethinking, and Im sure there are many issues Daniel is working on to
improve it.

One of these is the broken download, corrupt download thing.  This
shouldnt be hard to fix since resuming file transfers is easy to do, and
well supported by the various fetch programs out there.  Another thing
is the fact that SRC_URI needs to have USE dependency support added,
so files not needed for building arent downloaded.

Then theres the issue about perhaps extending .ebuild scripts to possibly
have a src_fetch() function.  In this way, you could write CVS or CVSup
commands to get source, and package it up or whatever you want.  Then
developers could get the benefit of being able to have CVS source trees
merged into their filesystem with all the nice benefits of portage.. like the
MD5 package database, the config file protection and everything else.

Of course my personal preference would be to extend SRC_URI to handle
cvs:// and maybe cvsup:// URL types!  Now that would be cool.  Come up
with a simple syntax for such a thing..  wow then portage would be the coolest
thing for linux development since gcc.  Of course Im just the sucker to volunteer
help come up with such a thing.  The need for this type of thing is pretty clear
in my opinion, I was just waiting untill somebody else spoke up to spark
interest.  Now Im not alone. heheh.

What other ideas are out there for improving the download subsystem?  Is
the wget.fetch, lukemftp.fetch thing still being thought out?