[gentoo-user] Re: sci-physics/root slotting?

[daid kahl]

> Hello,
>
> For anyone who uses the data analysis framework ROOT developed mainly
> at CERN (sorry, I didn't name it 'root'), I can imagine that slotting
> would be an extremely useful feature.

> It occurred to me tonight that adding slotting should be easy and very
> useful.

Not true!  The slotting isn't supported upstream, and it requires a
lot of modification to all the ebuilds.  As I have no experience, it's
also not clear to me if I slot everything including things in etc and
man pages.  I can see arguments both ways.

> If this seems like a good feature request, I'll put a modified ebuild
> on bugzilla for all present root versions after I can test it (may
> take a few days, since root isn't a quick compile and I have physics
> to do).

I will consider this a serious project, but progress will not be
quick, since I have a lot to learn.  Honestly it might make more sense
to hit the upstream mailing lists first and see what they think about
slotting, since the implementation is probably a lot easier from the
source than doing crazy crap in the ebuilds like moving things in,
say, usr/include/root to usr/include/root-${SLOT} and every other
directory, not to mention recursively hitting the same thing on bin/
and setting up symlinks and a module to handle switching all them.
For example, suppose a new version gives me a new binary.  Now the
eselect module needs to know it can't switch that symlink on the old
version; I'm sure this has been done for other packages, but like I
said, I need to learn about it first.

> Obviously, if this happens, I need to consider a bugzilla feature
> request on eselect as well, or make eselect-root.

This will need some learning as well on my part, as above.

~daid