[gentoo-dev] allowing configuration of builds?

[Pete Gavin <pete@gentoo.org>]

Hi,

I was thinking about a way we could allow configuration information to
be passed to the ebuild scripts at build time. This information could be
stored in the package database, so that doing "ebuild
/var/db/pkg/{whatever}/{whatever}.ebuild remerge" would create the exact
same package as before. We could make it so that if you do something
like "ebuild {path-to-ebuild-file} query" it will tell you what
configuration options are available, then you could set those options on
the ebuild command line. That way, say, for example, there are packages
that can use gnome, but don't require it, you could do

ebuild {ebuild-file} merge without-gnome

or some such to build it w/o gnome support. The ebuild file will check
for these options and set the appropriate command line switches to
configure. You could even cause these options to apply different
patches. Has anyone else thought about this?

Pete