Gentoo Archives: gentoo-portage-dev

From: Mike Auty <mike.auty@×××××.com>
To: gentoo-portage-dev@l.g.o
Subject: [gentoo-portage-dev] Package moves in overlays
Date: Sat, 07 Jan 2006 22:15:12
Message-Id: 43C03D2A.2090107@gmail.com
1 Hi,
2 I maintain an internal overlay directory for my users that gives them
3 some slightly modified packages, and meta-packages to help keep them all
4 up-to-date. Every so often I've produced an ebuild and put it in a
5 category that I though appropriate and later an official gentoo version
6 is released that's in a different directory. I'd quite like them to
7 automatically update to it, so I started looking into how portage
8 performs package moves...
9 It appears that portage has a list of files under
10 /usr/portage/profiles/updates/ that contain all the package renames, etc
11 that have happened at any particular time. I haven't managed to find
12 much documentation on this however (probably since it's only really used
13 by the main portage maintainers). However, I tried creating one within
14 my overlay. I had a test user attempt to gensync with the overlay and
15 then see if it would notice the update. Apparently it didn't, even
16 after trying a full emerge --sync.
17 So my questions are, is there any documentation I could look at for
18 portage's movement mechanism that isn't just the source code (I managed
19 to trace it back to a few update_ents functions in portage.py, but
20 couldn't make much of them since I haven't studied the internals of
21 portage much)? Is it possible to provide movement directives in an
22 overlay, or is that only applicable to the main tree? If so where would
23 I find out how to do it? If not, what is the suggested mechanism for
24 carrying this out (the best I can come up with is having the renamed
25 package block the original, but this requires all the users to unmerge a
26 package before the update will take)? Also if not is this functionality
27 ever going to be added? I realise that portage was never designed to
28 handle multiple trees, and that the overlays are just a small added
29 extra, but I thought it might still be possible to add this feature. If
30 anyone has any other ideas or suggestions I'd be most greatful. Thanks
31 very much for your time...
32 Mike 5:)
33 --
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