[gentoo-project] Proposal for add-on file utility (run after emerge update)

[Walter Dnes]

On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 07:05:55AM -0400, Rich Freeman wrote
> Alas, I couldn't attend the council meeting in-person, but it seems
> like council missed the point of my request RE commits against
> maintainer wishes (or maybe not - if so I'll happily shut up as far as
> persuading the council goes).  That said, I expressed it as a general
> request in the hope to not have something systemd-specific, and it
> sounds like that is not desired.

  I think the best way to avoid maintainer conflicts is to take this out
of the hands of maintainers, and put it in the hands of users.  At one
time there was a package of all possible systemd units that could be
installed as one ebuild.  Apparently, some "inode fundamentalists"
objected to having a bunch of unnecessary files dumped on their hard
drives (imagine that), so that package was removed.  I suggest a more
targetted approach...
* a script (or compiled program)
* that reads the output of "eix-installed -a"
* compares against a config file in /etc
* adds or deletes files based on the contents of the config file

  I was originally thinking of systemd units, but this could be applied
to initscripts or man files or info files or html docs or whatever.  In
addition to pulling in standard stuff, it could pull in custom units or
docs from "personal overlay" sources.  It would usually be run once,
right after an update.

  IANACP (I Am Not A C Programmer), so I would probably do this in bash
if I did it strictly for personal use.  But I'm beginning to wonder if
it might be a useful approach resolve some conflicts between various
groups of users/developers.  I.e. end-users could easily customize their
systems' *REGARDLESS OF HOW DEVELOPERS SET UP EBUILDS*.  This might
require a "systemd units herd" to supply a tarball with systemd units
that would be selectively installed.  And possibly a "documentation
herd", etc.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@××××××××.org>