[gentoo-dev] (FS) Attributes for Ebuilds?

[Michael Kohl]

Hi all!

Following all the recent discussion about categories in the Portage
tree, having packages in several categories at once, defining key words
for packages to ease finding a similar package an idea came to my mind.

Would it be possible to use filesystem attributes for Ebuilds (of course
only if the FS supports this, maybe a local useflag can do the trick)?
This would allow users to build categories "on the fly" using a kind of
live query mechanism. 

People familiar with BeFS most probably know what I'm talking about, for
anyone else just a little info:

This would allow to store metadata in text form for each ebuild as a
filesystem attribute. Therefore your filesystem kind of acts like a
database. Using this mechanism you also could add your own attributes
(e.g. "try_this" for ebuilds you're interested in testing sometime) and
then list all ebuilds having this attribute. 

Also the setup part of an Ebuild could set an attribute like "installed"
in pkg_postinst, so it would be even easier to find all the packages
installed on your system. Using live queries (e.g. in a nice GUI) this
list would change immediately after you emerged a new package. Also
finding applications similar to each other would be quite easy, as you
can store quite a lot of metadata (e.g. mp3, ogg, media, player, etc.
for the xmms ebuild). Sure this could be done in various other ways, but
using FS attributes just sounds like a good way of doing it.

Comments (especially about the various FS and their usefullnes for this
purpose), ideas, thoughts anyone?

Michael 

P.S. Sorry, the thoughts in this mail aren't all that well organized or
explained, I'm not feeling to good today...

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