Re: [gentoo-dev] multiple dependencies with installing packages from the CD

[<drobbins@gentoo.org>]

On Fri, Feb 09, 2001 at 08:06:45PM -0000, Sean Cull wrote:

> Regarding the recursive package merge, couldn't one just modify the ebuild 
> script mentioned in your bash tutorial on IBM Developerworks and add some 
> lines in to check the dependencies, then if it needs, say, Gnomelibs-1.0.4 
> (or whatever the current version is), it searches the "All" directory for 
> the appropriate package and installs it before returning to the original 
> package you wanted to install. I guess this is how the FreeBSD ports system 
> works. Or would something like that need to be written in something other 
> than a scripting language?
> If I'm totally wrong on this, sorry... I'm still learning =)

We can't just use the "All" directory because we have some packages with
identical names, but in different categories.  For example, there's
sys-build/gcc and sys-devel/gcc.  The only way to deal with this is to actually
look inside the package at the packaging information, and this is a very slow
process with our current package format.  Once we add an (mostly
backwards-compatible) enhancement to our current format, finding out this
information will be very fast and will allow the Portage system to "find out"
the actual category of a random .tbz2 file rather than relying on "contextual"
(i.e. what directory it's in) information in order to figure out the category.

Best Regards,

-- 
Daniel Robbins					<drobbins@gentoo.org>
President/CEO					http://www.gentoo.org 
Gentoo Technologies, Inc.