[gentoo-osx] porting maxos port to posix (ala openpkg)

[m h]

Hello-

I posted in the gentoo-dev mailing list yesterday, but figured I'd post here 
since it is somewhat closer related. I'm investigating the differences 
between portage and openpkg. For those who don't know about openpkg, openpkg 
allows one to install rpms in a sandboxed environment accross multiple unix 
platforms (bsd, redhat, debian, gentoo,...). It consists of a way to 
bootstrap an environment and a bunch of spec files used to create rpms 
specifically tailored for that platform. The idea being you could run the 
"same" components across different platforms in your environment.

It seems that Fink and Portage for OSX are providing similar functionality 
on top of OSX. My question is what would be involved in generalizing the 
Portage OSX port to unix platforms similar to what openpkg is doing. An 
example might be that while I need to run Suse at work, I could install 
portage into a sandboxed location and enter that environment. This would 
allow me to run newer components, better integrated, security patched, etc, 
while still having the corporate environment if I needed it.

Ideally the benefits for doing this would be to allow many platforms to take 
advantage of portage, use the large ebuild tree (openpkg has ~400 
components), as well as use ebuilds that are tested probably a little bit 
more than openpkg (I believe the gentoo install base is a least one or two 
orders of magnitude larger than openpkg).

Any thoughts, comments, or suggestions are appreciated.

thanks

matt