Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] Re: User created package lists

[Brian]

On Tue, 2006-21-03 at 10:50 -0600, MIkey wrote:
> tvali wrote:
>
> > So, if portage would be looked as lists and operations with lists
> > (calculating dependencies of package would be operation with list of
> > that package and list of all - portage tree -, then); building tools
> > [shell commands] for creating those lists and tools for operations
> > with those lists and leaving "emerge" tool just a handy interface to
> > command them would be imho great.

For a completely re-vamped portage, broken up into many smaller modules
check out the pkgcore development.

http://gentooexperimental.org/~ferringb/bzr/pkgcore/

>
> What about something along these lines...
>
> Add the capability for emerge to take a category as an argument, emerge
> www-apps for example, and emerge all packages within that category.
> Optionally make it so this will only work on categories within
> PORTDIR_OVERLAY, or create a new type of overlay, LIST_OVERLAY.
>
> Then the user can create overlays with their own category names and symlink
> in the package directories they want from the real portage tree.
>

I think you both are making it more complicated than it needs to be.
Creating meta packages listing all the deps etc. may make portage work
for emerges but won't give a user the heads up when one of those deps
are upgradable so easily.

Marius has stated that user package lists are to be supported in the
future (OK), Porthole will have the ability to get ahead of portage
because it is not concerned with the direct merging/unmerging of
packages and system management.  It is merely a way to display package
data and ask portage (emerge) to merge/unmerge packages.  So back to my
original question:

Will user created lists be located in the /etc/portage directory along
with the other user configs?  If so will the format be similar to the
package.* files?  For user package lists I imagine there could be the
need to control version ranges, so the standard atoms should somehow
apply.

I would like to try and get as close to a portage format as can be
foreseen so that it will require less updates/re-coding later when that
feature is implemented.

eg.


/etc/portage/lists/

This directory would hold any number of user created lists.  I am not
sure that additional subdirectories would be desired or needed.  After
all this feature would be to help simplify some tasks, not make ones
head explode trying to follow something overly complex.


/etc/portage/lists/userlist1

format:

net-www/apache 
www-apache/mod_perl
...


How would you atomize a version range?  >=, <=, =, <, > for one ended
range limits the existing format from package.* files could be used.

eg. limit net-www/apache to version 2 only?  Lets pretend a version 3 is
already released, so there could be versions series1, series 2, series
3.

>=net-www/apache-2.0.0
<=net-www/apache-2.99.99
www-apache/mod_perl
...

Where the upper range limit would immediately follow the lower range
limit

Or would an fstab type format be used.  More available options could be
easily assigned.

# package		lowest-version	highest-version		updates 
net-www/apache 			2.0.0		2.99.0		M,K

Where updates could be one or more of "M" manual, "A" automatic, "N"
never, "K" binary packages only.

It would not be that hard to implement features like the updates field
and range limits in porthole.  Since it is not feasible in the current
portage code-base, a wrapper module/script could be made to implement it
for cli.
-- 
Brian <dol-sen@×××××.net>

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