Re: [gentoo-qa] Support of other package managers

[Mark Loeser <halcy0n@gentoo.org>]

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Zac Medico <zmedico@gentoo.org> said:
> Yeah, I think what's really needed is a specification of what is allowed in
> gentoo's official portage tree.  Let's take "per-package use.mask" (bug
> 96368) as an example.  It could be implemented as package.use.mask or as
> package.mask + use deps.  Which will it be?  Will paludis, pkgcore, and portage
> all handle this functionality the same way or not?  If we're going to allow new
> features such as this into the official portage tree, we need to make sure that
> they conform to a specification that everyone has agreed upon.

This is the exact problem I'm trying to address.  You'll never get all
of the projects to agree, since they all want to go in slightly
different directions and do different things.  All three are great
ideas, but we should only support the one that is official for Gentoo,
and not make any changes to the tree.  (Note: changes here is any
modification or addition of files in the tree for the sole purpose of
working with an alternate package manager)

Either way, I think this is something we should hold off on for now, and
have the council decide upon.  We shouldn't just make these changes
without having some discussion taking place (the flamewar on g-dev@ is
not a discussion, and is only a small minority of people giving their
two cents).

Whatever the decision is, the addition of another package manager makes
QA harder to do since we have to consider all of them.  Adding a new
package manager and saying we don't support it, nor are we sure if we
will ever support it, does not seem acceptable at all to me.  The
decision should be made if we plan on supporting it so we can work on
actually supporting it, or if this should be a completely separate
project and they can work on their own to make changes to ebuilds which
support their own functionality.

-- 
Mark Loeser   -   Gentoo Developer (cpp gcc-porting qa toolchain x86)
email         -   halcy0n AT gentoo DOT org
                  mark AT halcy0n DOT com
web           -   http://dev.gentoo.org/~halcy0n/
                  http://www.halcy0n.com

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