Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] Proposal of "uncooperative-root" in SUPPORTED_FEATURES

[Greg Turner]

For a while my cygwin port needed something like this.  The problem was,
as, no doubt, the gentleman with the ridiculous name is all too familiar,
that you are fighting against a very long-standing convention.  Anything
based on autotools tends to be a serious disaster, for example.

There was another problem -- more of an institutional/human-nature thing
than a technical problem.  When I was on this same mission as you,
silly-name, it quickly became clear that people didn't give a shit and
didn't want those patches.

I hope those of you who I'm referring to won't be offended by that -- I'm
not making a normative statement here, just what I believe to be a factual
one.  Indeed there were many good reasons for them to feel that way,
including:

1. They (the people who didn't give a shit) didn't share my problem or
understand why I should have it.  The explanation, in my case, was
nontrivial.

2. The result of my approach was to greatly enlarge many core-system
ebuilds with huge patches to the upstream code; those evaluating those
patches would have been (I don't think I ever actually submitted them) the
same whose responsibility it would have become to maintain them.

In other words, my patches would have amounted to a request to sign the
decision-maker up for a bunch of ongoing busy-work, which they had no
personal stake in.

3. The number of people needing this feature would most likely have been
very small (of course, arguably, that number could have grown, once the
thing started to get off the ground.  But that still left me with a
chicken-and-egg problem even if it solved the justification problem).

4. It made alot of "tidy" ebuilds into "untidy" ebuilds.  This creates a
very real aesthetic problem and disinclines people to look on the
proposition favorably, myself included.  Humans like their technology to
look pretty.

I eventually found other ways to deal with it, and was able to drop those
patches from my tree.  But I lost many days of work screwing around with it.

I guess my only advice to you is, I strongly suggest you find ways to solve
this problem abstractly, rather than at an ebuild level, wherever possible.

One way you might look at is LD_PRELOAD trickery, allowing you to simply
lie about /bin/{ba,}sh and some other files' contents.  That probably
wouldn't have worked in my case, but I suspect it might in yours.  If that
won't work, then I guess my next idea would be to maintain a library of
code-injection hacks that could automatically fix those out-of-prefix
references in scripts and C code.

Abstract approaches at least stand a chance by avoiding problems #2 and #4,
which, I suspect, would be the big ones if you ever intend to upstream this
feature.  As for the idea of maintaining a huge overlay... sure, go for it,
but be warned: it's really hard.

-gmt

On Sat, Jul 5, 2014 at 1:24 AM, X dej <
dreplaceelettereejbyeletterea@×××××.com> wrote:

> Hello to all,
>
> Summary: I have made many mods to sys-app/portage (2013 version). The
> result is
> a proposal of patch for latest sys-app/portage, see below.
>
> Main result of my mods to gentoo prefix:
>
>   FEATURES=uncooperative-root emerge -bv =firefox-17
>
> now works on EPREFIX on Android-4.1 ARM. I use neither fakeroot nor
> GNURoot.
> root access never required. Distributed as a .tbz2 and a .ebuild by
> gentooandroid.sf.net, along with the necessary stage3.
>
> @dol-sen advised me one week ago on #gentoo-portage to post a rebased
> patch for
> HEAD of git.overlays.gentoo.org/proj/portage.git : I just hosted this
> patch on
>
> sf.net/projects/gentooandroid/files/sys-app_portage-current-HEAD_patch/download
> and it is also attached to this post, and to previous post on gentoo-dev
> mailing list; Joshua Kinard from there just advised me to post this patch
> at
> gentoo-portage-dev (here).
>
> I request comments and discussions about this patch. Summary:
>
> pym/portage/const.py     + (this is SUPPORTED_FEATURES+=uncooperative-root)
> cnf/make.conf.example    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++
> bin/ebuild-helpers/emake ++++++++
> bin/ebuild.sh            --+++++++
> bin/misc-functions.sh    -+++++
> bin/phase-helpers.sh     +++++
>
> My aim is to take your remarks into account, then to build an overlay
> (will be
> hosted at endrood.sf.net) with up-to-date versions of all my mods. The
> final
> result will be a tested version of above patch, together with lastest
> builds
> for firefox, squeak, scala, gnucash, ...
>
> Thanks for you attention.
>
> Xdej (I disclosed my real identity to Rick "Zero_Chaos" Farina).
>