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

[Jason Stubbs]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: George Shapovalov [mailto:george@g.o]
> Sent: Sunday, December 07, 2003 11:40 AM
> To: gentoo-portage-dev@g.o
> Subject: Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] portage-ng concurse entry
> Was: Updated Portage project page
>
>
> On Saturday 06 December 2003 17:44, Jason Stubbs wrote:
> > It's not getting ahead of things! That's a requirement that's not
> > covered yet. "Package definition should be powerful but
> simple with a
> > small learning curve" or something to that effect.
>
> 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. Even then this is a
> major endeavor
> that would require a very good reason (nothing short of
> deadly limitations of
> the present format, which I woudn't say is the case).
> Furthermore, this would
> require wide publicity and even votes if we do not want to
> alienate users, as
> this is the change that definitely will affect them (take a
> look at number of
> new ebuild submissions ;)).

There's another requirement! "The package system needs to be backward
compatible or have a compatibility layer for existing ebuilds" or
something to that effect. Having to rewrite them all just for a package
manager migration would not only be insane but would be, dare I say,
impossible - by the time they are all rewritten, they'd all have become
obsolete. If there is backward compatibility, they should be able to be
phased out in less than a year (assuming the format is in fact
replaced).

> But then I don't really see the problem with present format.
> 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. 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.

Personally, I don't think the current ebuild format is so bad either
while the dev team was relatively small. But there are a number of
places that mistakes can be made making for bad QA. I think it does make
sense to split the file into the pkg_*/src_* stuff and the various vars
as per current requirements spec. I would also prefer to see the
pkg_*/src_* stuff abstracted so that an ebuild is never a security risk.
ATM, pkg_postinst is the worst that I can think of from a security
viewpoint.

Regards,
Jason Stubbs


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