Gentoo Archives: gentoo-portage-dev

From: Sebastian Luther <SebastianLuther@×××.de>
To: gentoo-portage-dev@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-portage-dev] layout.conf: What's our opinion?
Date: Mon, 20 Jan 2014 11:05:34
Message-Id: 52DD02FA.3040109@gmx.de
1 Hi all,
2
3 ${repository}/metadata/layout.conf is a file that allows a repository
4 maintainer to adjust the package manager's behavior for a repository.
5 I guess the best known is the 'masters' key, but there are lots of other
6 things by now (see man portage).
7
8 Currently layout.conf is not under PMS control. This basically means
9 that every PM (or version thereof) may support different keys and assign
10 different meanings to them. Portage's behavior for unknown keys in
11 layout.conf is to ignore them without a warning.
12
13 The bad thing about this is that some layout.conf keys portage currently
14 supports, may render the repository unusable for a PM if it doesn't
15 support them.
16
17 To avoid this type of breakage in other areas (ebuilds, dependency
18 resolution, ...) PMS has been created. Since the council demands PMS to
19 be followed, I would expect that they also want the general idea "of not
20 breaking things randomly" to be followed.
21
22 This brings us to reason that made me write that mail. Some days ago
23 Arfrever committed some additions to layout.conf [1], for which he
24 apparently had the ack from Zac from some months ago [2].
25
26 After discussing this one IRC I came to the conclusion that we just
27 disagree on how we should handle additions to layout.conf.
28
29 Basically it's either
30 1) "We add things as we see fit." or
31 2) "We should only add things if absolutely necessary.".
32
33 I obviously would prefer 2) to follow the "things shouldn't break
34 randomly" route.
35
36 So what's your opinion? Should we go for 1) or 2) or something else?
37
38 - Sebastian
39
40
41 [1]
42 http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/portage.git;a=commit;h=4c409a049c394389b1de398db511380e2fed0437
43
44 [2] http://dpaste.com/1560782/

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] layout.conf: What's our opinion? Alexander Berntsen <alexander@××××××.net>
[gentoo-portage-dev] Re: layout.conf: What's our opinion? "W. Trevor King" <wking@×××××××.us>
Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] layout.conf: What's our opinion? Mike Frysinger <vapier@g.o>