Re: [gentoo-dev] portage database management

[John Nilsson <john@milsson.nu>]

On this topic, I'd like to ad some ideas. How about a package database
on some central server ( and mirrors...). This db would have more
indepth information of every package, HOWTOS, bugs, discussions all that
kind of information you would wan't (mostly just a gentoo specific info
text and link to a homepage I suspect, but you COULD add more).

This way you could have a forum for each package. This is probably
wanted if gentoo keeps growing, gentoo-user would be heavy as
linux-kernel.

/John

On Sat, 2003-02-01 at 11:17, Rendhalver [Peter Brown] wrote:
> >>>>> "Ingo" == Ingo Krabbe <i.krabbe@dokom.net> writes:
> 
>     Ingo> On Sat, Feb 01, 2003 at 07:16:44PM +1000, Rendhalver [Peter Brown] wrote:
>     >> ah ok so you want to put the actual portage tree into a database yes?
> 
>     Ingo> nope, I think it would be much nicer to portage to create a mirror
>     Ingo> image of the portage tree in a database, together with all textual
>     Ingo> information available.  I want to leave the portage as it is for
>     Ingo> installing and updating packages but I want to be able to get events
>     Ingo> from portage when new packages arrive (rsync), are installed (emerge)
>     Ingo> or uninstalled (unmerge) or updated (emerge -u), so I can keep track of
>     Ingo> it.
> 
> sounds like a fun and useful project
> 
>     Ingo> Of course it would be a solution to manage everything in a database, hmm
>     Ingo> it is a tree you know, a big tree in recent times, so it should be a
>     Ingo> database object.  But the evolution of portage was filesystem oriented,
>     Ingo> which is understandable for portability, stability and transparency.  At
>     Ingo> least the filesystem is a database too, a slow one though, but fast
>     Ingo> enough for the installation purposes, measured against the compilation
>     Ingo> and download times.
> 
>     Ingo> I often bothered about the problem of searching a package by keyword or
>     Ingo> package name (emerge -s foo) and (emerge -S foo), when I just want to
>     Ingo> get a quick overview about a topic or want to look up this new package I
>     Ingo> just heard of in this newgroup yesterday.
> 
> yeah i know what you mean there
> 
> you would have to make it so the database can be easily updated from
> the output of a emerge rsync (or a cvs update for us developer types)
> or do some kind of check on the portage tree for modifications to ebuilds
> 
>     Ingo> This operation takes much too long for my taste and thats what I like to
>     Ingo> keep in a database.  I know there are textual database systems like
>     Ingo> htref, but I don't understand their installation and configuration
>     Ingo> syntax.  Hmm, I'm a C Programmer you know, it is much easier to me to
>     Ingo> put everything in a Berkeley DB put a job in the background and fire
>     Ingo> some events or raise some signals.
> 
> i know what you mean there :)
> i would use something that can talk to multiple database backends so
> the user has a choice in database to use
> 
> maybe you could use libgda/libgnomedb/mergeant for this ??
> they can talk to lots of databases and the list is growing as well
> last i looked there was an LDAP backend for libgda

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