On Wed, 2006-05-17 at 20:55 +0100, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> The plan, which may be full of holes, may change and may just be me
> being crazy, is to replace using a stage with something like:

OK.  So not only are you planning on replacing portage, you're planning
on replacing Release Engineering.  Thanks, but we are not interested.

> paludis --config-suffix install --install system
> 
> which will then go off and grab the relevant binary packages from a
> remote location and merge them onto ROOT. Being able to do something
> along these lines is a) one of several reasons for --config-suffix and
> b) a large part of why I don't want to use the Portage tbz2 format,
> where metadata and contents aren't separated.

Remote location, huh?  What about non-networked installations?

> | > | #2. Can paludis build all of the release materials required by the
> | > | Release Engineering release guidelines?
> | >
> | > No. Nor will it ever, nor will it need to.
> | 
> | Will you then instead try to create new guidelines that do result
> | into development of releases?
> 
> Assuming the above ends up not being insane, then yes.

Which would have to be accepted by the Release Engineering project.
Perhaps this point has been lost on you up until now.

> | > | #3. Can paludis build a portage-compatible VDB that can be used
> | > | by the Gentoo Linux Installer?
> | >
> | > No. Nor will it ever, nor will it need to.
> | 
> | Why will it not need to? Usage and support of paludis would be a lot
> | greater it it could work (with limited feature perhaps) on a portage
> | compatible VDB. You might work with the portage team to have portage
> | be aware of extensions in the VDB and handle them smartly (ignore
> | them?). At that point paludis could offer extra features while being
> | still portage compatible.
> 
> I'm pretty sure it would be easier to just not use anything in the
> installer that relies upon VDB when using Paludis. The installer code
> is flexible enough to make this not tooooo tricky.

You mean like *all* of the GRP-handling code?

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering - Strategic Lead
x86 Architecture Team
Games - Developer
Gentoo Linux