Re: [gentoo-dev] new guides

[Pete Gavin <pete@gentoo.org>]

On Fri, Apr 13, 2001 at 09:20:03AM -0600, Daniel Robbins wrote:
> > To recap, the idea was to have a C/C++ program listen on a pipe, then have
> > interfaces (in the language of your choice) do things like
> > "echo packagename>/thatpipe" - the backend would listen and install the package.
> 
> One problem with this solution is that we need a robust and feature-rich two-way
> communications stream.  For example, your request to install "foo/bar-1.0" may be
> answered by a list of dependencies that must be satisfied before installation is
> possible, or a particular dependency that couldn't be satisfied (if it's auto-resolving
> dependencies), or that the particular package wasn't found in the portage database.
> 
> With such a system as you describe, the Portage response would have to be placed
> in another file, and tying these two files into a communications stream would become
> tricky enough to make this a less-than-elegant, solution.  IMO.
> 

Well, the backend program *does* have both a stdin and stdout stream,
which would provide the two way communication stream you're talking
about. And we could also set up a socket file if necessary. Or even
unix sockets (but I think that would be overkill...)

Pete