Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] RPM build changes

[Nimish Pachapurkar]

On Sat, 2006-05-13 at 01:55 -0400, Ned Ludd wrote:
> On Fri, 2006-05-12 at 16:05 -0700, Nimish Pachapurkar wrote:
> > Hello All,
> >
> > I have been fiddling with Portage for a few weeks now. Recently, I was
> > trying to get the RPM creation with ebuild to work a little better. I
> > noticed that currently emerge does not support building RPMs, but ebuild
> > does.
> >
> > I have added some code to emerge that can build RPM for a package and
> > all its dependencies. It will optionally merge the package to the system
> > or just build an RPM. I am basically making this work very similar to
> > the --buildpkg and --buildpkgonly options.
> >
> > I am using --buildrpm (-r) and --buildrpmonly (-R) options currently for
> > these two tasks. However, if those two short options are reserved for
> > some other purpose, I am fine with changing them. (If so, please suggest
> > different short options).
> >
> > If this functionality is likely to be useful to other people also, I
> > would love to submit a patch.
> >
> > I think I have somewhat older version of portage. Which version should I
> > build the patch against, if I have to?
>
>
> 2.1 is in a feature freeze right now. Everybody is trying to tidy up
> existing functionality in preparation for 2006.1 But that would of
> otherwise been the branch of seen it committed to. probably best to
> give it a few weeks and revisit.
>

Sure, I will do that.

> rpm support however needs more than a few emerge switches. The existing
> package itself of rpm in the tree has a few problems and really needs a
> maintainer. Also portage's auto spec generation is on the side of far
> to basic to really be useful.
>

I have realized that already. I created a small tool in Python myself
using gentoolkit to get RPM-style list of first-level (or direct)
dependencies based on USE flags dynamically. It has been working well
for most of the cases. Unfortunately, I did not find a clean way to use
Portage dependency parsing. I could not find a way to get just the first
level dependencies without resolving them to specific ebuild files. 

I also had to solve the SLOT problem since RPM will not let you install
two packages with the same name at the same time. 

> A while ago a user Peter S. Mazinger <ps.m@×××.net> and myself
> discussed in semi detail a lot of the problems surrounding rpm support
> and later he sent me some patches that interpolated nicely with the
> existing rpm based distros. I mirrored those patches and they are
> all tagged with the names of the portage-rpm-*.patch
> http://dev.gentoo.org/~solar/patch_overlay/sys-apps/portage/
>
> You may find some of those patches inspirational to your work.
>
> good luck.
>

I looked at the patches briefly. I think the most interesting piece was
the treatment of config files based on PROTECTED_DIRS flag.

Thanks for your help.

> --
> Ned Ludd <solar@g.o>
> Gentoo Linux
>

- Nimish <npac@××××××××××.com>


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