Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] search functionality in emerge

[Marius Mauch]

On Sun, 23 Nov 2008 21:01:40 -0800 (PST)
devsk <funtoos@×××××.com> wrote:

> > not relying on custom system daemonsrunning in the background.
>
> Why is a portage daemon such a bad thing? Or hard to do? I would very
> much like a daemon running on my system which I can configure to sync
> the portage tree once a week (or month if I am lazy), give me a
> summary of hot fixes, security fixes in a nice email, push important
> announcements and of course, sync caches on detecting changes (which
> should be trivial with notify daemons all over the place) etc. Why is
> it such a bad thing?

Well, as an opt-in solution it might work (though most of what you
described is IMO just stuff for cron, no need to reinvent the wheel).

What I was saying is that _relying_ on custom system
daemons/filesystems for a _core subsystem_ of portage is the wrong
way, simply because it adds a substantial amount of complexity to the
whole package management architecture. It's one more thing that can
(and will) break, one more layer to take into account for any design
decisions, one more component that has to be secured, one more obstacle
to overcome when you want to analyze/debug things.
And special care must be taken if it requires special kernel support
and/or external packages. Do you want to make inotify support mandatory
to use portage efficiently? (btw, looks like inotify doesn't really
work with NFS mounts, which would already make such a daemon completely
useless for people using a NFS-shared repository)

And finally, if you look at the use cases, a daemon is simply overkill
for most cases, as the vast majority of people only use emerge
--sync (or wrappers) and maybe layman to change the tree, usually once
per day or less often. Do you really want to push another system daemon
on users that isn't of use to them?

> Its crazy to think that security updates need to be pulled in Linux.

That's IMO better be handled via an applet (bug #190397 has some code),
or just check for updates after a sync (as syncing is the only
way for updates to become available at this time). Maybe a message
could be added after sync if there are pending GLSAs, now that the glsa
support code is in portage.

Marius