Re: [gentoo-dev] new glep draft: Portage as a secondary package manager

[Brian Harring]

On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 02:28:49PM +0100, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> The problem isn't the packages. The problem is the ebuilds.
Agreed, although seemed to take a bit of dancing to get done to the 
fact that yes, changing the prefix has a good chance of working.

>From there, we're back to the old two step econf/eclasses _do_ address
a sizable portion of ebuilds in the tree ;)

> | > Eh? No, see, we have KEYWORDS, which indicate whether you can use a
> | > package on a given arch.
> |
> | Dodging my point.  You stated, "if we introduce it, people will expect
> | it to actually work".  It's defeatist logic; won't try because people
> | might bitch if they wade into experimental territory and get bit.
> |
> | That's the point I was getting at, which you seemed to ignore/not
> | understand.
> |
> | Pointing out that people might try an experimental feature and hit
> | issues and bitch as a reason for _not_ doing something is just plain
> | daft.
>
> Except we have an easy way of marking which ebuilds will actually work
> with this thing. Why not use it? It's a hell of a lot cleaner, it gives
> us better feedback and it makes it easier for the users.
Not much for a keyword route personally, since (imo) it's a slight 
perversion of the focus of keywords.  If the keywording route was 
taken, would need to either duplicate existing keywords (have 
x86/~x86, and x86-weirdo-prefix ~x86-weirdo-prefix), or require two 
specific keywords being set (x86 and weirdo-prefix from the example 
above).  

I'd suspect your metadata addition (which needs a better name then 
ICANINSTALLTO) is the best route.

> Per-ebuild whitelisting, kind of like KEYWORDS. This has the added
> advantage of making it easy for additional kinds of install target to be
> added at some point.
See above (agreed).

> | So, fink demonstration of --prefix hackery?
>
> If you want a better example, try either SGI or Sun's GNU tools ports.
> But they don't use ebuilds either.
Well, main point was that the underlying packages _can_ swing this 
type of hackery for the most part, what is needed is a tweak to our 
ebuild conventions to allow for it.

Meanwhile, iirc from the last irc conversation on this, either you or 
dsd brought up the point of needing to be able to query if (using vim 
as an example) vim-core was $home, rather then usr|$PREFIX.  Care to 
elaborate a bit?  Mainly wondering if to encompass your requests, it 
might require extra metadata from the depend standpoint.
~brian
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