[gentoo-soc] GSoC suggestion - Emerge or some of the Portage features implemented in Common Lisp

[Crystalsun]

Hello everybody!
I want to share some thoughts on a project that can be implemented during Google SUmmer of Code.

So, moving on to the proposal - I suggest that implementing emerge or some of its features in Common Lisp may be a great thing.
The first and main reason for that is the interactiveness Common Lisp provides (and Python doesn't).
For example, when emerging a package, if an error occures, the whole process will die since the merge of the current atom. However, if emerge was written in Common Lisp, it could be possible to interactively debug the error and continue the process, which, overall, means more user control of what's happening and better hotfixes, thanks to the fact that the REPL is part of the language itself, not provided by the *outer environment*. Nevertheless, changing emerge also means changing ebuilds, which is truly a big change.

Thus, I understand it may be too hard/long to implement, so a compromising, yet useful solution might be available. For instance, it could be fairly great to localize some task Portage is slow/bad at, and reimplement it (what about resolving dependencies interactively?). That might be a good place to start already.