Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] Regarding packages.provided

[John Nilsson]

On tor, 2005-06-02 at 22:47 +0200, Dominik Bathon wrote:
> Yes, portage does this installing, but only "inside" an ebuild. My idea
> was to allow a user to just do this step, without having to write an
> ebuild.

Here follows some random thoughts I have had on this issue.

I belive the fundamental problem is to relate a bunch of files to
eachother, in a meaningfull way, such that you can perform operations
on, and keep information on, all of them.

One solution to this problem was the invention of the directory. With
this you kan keep a bunch of files ordered in diffrent directorys. The
problem with this solution is that a single file can only be part of one
relationship.

One way to solve this is with links. Sym- and hardlinks makes it
possible to let files be part of more relationships.

Now in this scheme realtionships is nothing more than a common
name-prefix in the filesystem.

So we could install a package in
say /packages/org/gentoo/<category>/<package>/<some-slot-and-version-scheme>/<fhs-compliant-installation>
and than install links to those files in /
To install a package not in portage you would install it with a suitable
prefix and then link it in a similar way.

I think there is a distribution that use a scheme like this just to have
a non-fhs-compliant system.

<possibly-abstract-and-nonsensical>

To extend this further it could be possible to construct a system where,
instead of linking every file of a package, the dirs would be layered on
top of / in a transparent layer together with some sorting and
prisoritizing policy system. F.ex. some binaries could have a policy to
direct all file creations to their install layer.

</possibly-abstract-and-nonsensical>


Now, an entierly diffrent route would be to have an ebuild-shell where
actions to build and install a package was recorded just as if it was an
ebuild. En ebuild could be generated from this too.

/John

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