Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] Re: Bugzilla Bug 112779: New and Improved Way to Handle /etc/portage

[capitalista]

On 11/21/05, Zac Medico <zmedico@×××××.com> wrote:
> Does it often make sense to group a set of package.* files together?  Can you provide one or more examples of how this is useful?

Sure, and I'll use KDE yet again for one example. In fact, this would
have come in handy recently. When the 3.5 betas/rc's started rolling
out, it would have been very useful to have a package.unmask that
unmasked them all (especially for the kde-meta users since there's
over 200 packages) along with a package.keywords file to use when the
devs didn't have it marked for x86 (or anything other than amd64 for
that matter). And, if whomever was grouping it felt like it, they
could include an optional package.use file to tune the ebuilds for
you.

With packages like xorg going modular on an official basis, the
ability to have everything ready to go just by unpacking a tarball
into /etc/portage/includes and emerging would save folks a lot of
work. Not to mention, it would make things nicer maintenance wise
obviously, as you could have /etc/portage/includes/xorg to house the
package.* files.

So, the main use would be for meta-packages that have a lot going on,
like KDE or the upcoming xorg 7.0. Package maintainers or even users
could make the tar.gz's easily available. This kind of grouping would
probably be even better for non-x86ers.

I would be surprised if the ability to group package.* files stayed
limited to modular pacakges, though. I could see people putting this
ability to use for packages of a certain type (like games or
multimedia packages) or in conjunction with an overlay like
breakmygentoo.

There's even the potential for people to group their own package.*
files that they use on their system and distribute them easily, with
other users not having to merge them with the current, singular
package.* files. If they don't like those changes, it's easy enough to
revert back to normal just by moving/removing that directory. Again,
this would be even nicer for folks on other architectures, where
keywording could play a large role.

And, aside from those examples, I think that many new possibilites
will come once it's made available for people to use. I could
definitely see people on the forums figuring out new uses for this.

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