[gentoo-dev] Portage metadata

I've been looking into writing some code to get useful information out
of the portage system. Things like lists of packages using a given
USE flag and so forth. (see bug 16331 for something I wrote already)

Currently I was just wanting to stick to parsing all the ebuilds and
data in the tree directly, despite the lack of speed that involves.

The data in PORTDIR/metadata/cache appears to be promising, but I can't
find any defined format document on it.
It also appears to be a duplicate of /var/cache/edb/dep/ for the most
part.

Digging around google I get this from the google cache only:
http://www.google.ca/search?q=cache:Y_c08C4PKQwC:www.gentoo.org/~karltk/projects/munchie/submission-guide.html+gentoo+ebuild+submission+guide&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
This appears to be slightly out of date tho.

1. Is there any defined format to the metadata?
2. For later speedups, is anybody looking into using actual database
formats for the data? (GDBM/BDB/NDBM/etc.)

Once I get a little more time on my hands from school, I'd like to prove
my mettle as a developer to the gentoo community and join up as a
developer.
(For those interested in the meantime:
http://www.orbis-terrarum.net/?l=people.robbat2.resume )

-- 
Robin Hugh Johnson
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