Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] portage-ng concurse entry Was: Updated Portage project page

[Kapil Thangavelu]

are we at the stage yet, where some structured metadata representation
outside of the ebuild will be used ?

incidentally the mailing list manager isn't honoring requests for
archives/indexes... so, apologies in advance if this has already been
discussed/decided.

-k

On 12/6/03 11:40 PM, "Daniel Robbins" <drobbins@g.o> wrote:

> On Sat, 2003-12-06 at 19:39, George Shapovalov wrote:
>> Hm, isn't it a bit too late to change ebuild format, with us sitting on 7000+
>> ebuilds? The only reasonable way to do so is to make it structurally
>> compatible and create a converter tool.
>
> It would be very difficult to get good results from a converter tool,
> due to the many complexities of ebuild parsing.
>
>> But then I don't really see the problem with present format.
>
> You just explained how much of a chore it would be to convert from
> ebuild to something else. Doesn't this point to a weakness in the syntax
> of ebuilds themselves? I mean, if they were more formally defined, they
> could be converted to XML or anything else without much effort.
>
>> bash involvment
>> is really necessary only during the pkg_* and src_* steps, when a lot of
>> other stuff is going to happen anyway, so this is hardly a bottleneck.
>
> This isn't an informed comment :) Portage depends on bash for extraction
> of metadata as well. Extraction of metadata is *the* Portage bottleneck.
>
>> To get
>> definitions of various vars and dependency information out is trivial and can
>> be done in anything. That bash is involved in this step at present is
>> unfortunate, but there were reasons for it and it definitely may be undone
>> even for the present portage.
>
> If it were trivial we would have done it already. The only way to "undo"
> the dependence on bash is to make seemingly arbitrary rules of what is
> legal and not legal to type inside ebuilds. This leads to a lot of
> strange rules (such as rules about where you can and can't use variable
> expansion, and where you can and can't use bash conditionals) and makes
> ebuild-writing a tricky process. We already have some of these rules in
> effect, and it makes ebuild-writing a bit trickier than it should be.
>
> We don't want ebuild-writing to be tricky, so the solution is to
> architect a way to represent ebuild data in a way that is more useful to
> portage-ng and more natural for ebuild-ng writers.
>
> Regards,
>
> Daniel
>


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