[gentoo-dev] CWD-relative ROOT support in portage: misfeature?

[Gregory M. Turner]

It has come to my attention that gentoo supports "relative" ROOT, which 
is to say that, by design, portage will act as though (in bash terms):

   ROOT

equals

   "${PWD}/${ROOT}"

when (again in bash terms):

   [[ $ROOT != /* ]]

at the moment execution crosses the boundary between a non-portage 
program and a portage program.  For example, I ran the following from a 
bash-prompt with PWD=/tmp in a portage-2.2 ~amd64 environment:

   greg@fedora64vmw /tmp $ mkdir foo
   greg@fedora64vmw /tmp $ ROOT=foo portageq envvar ROOT
   /tmp/foo/

Question: do we really want this behavior?

I have reason to believe that almost nobody uses this feature (namely, 
gcc-config and binutils-config are both broken under it for ages and 
nobody filed a bug or fixed it: see bugzilla #431104).

Does /anybody/ use this feature?  If not, I'd suggest that the portage 
team might ask itself whether the benefits of continuing to maintain it 
are greater than the hassle and potential for error it facilitates.

Just my 2c,

-gmt