Re: [gentoo-dev] some additions to portage/ebuild and some other nice thingys i'dd like :)

[Daniel Robbins <drobbins@gentoo.org>]

On Wed, Apr 25, 2001 at 08:09:49PM +0200, troxx@segfault.nl wrote:

> Just a few things i'dd like to see in RC5 (or earlier):

If you pay me a good sum of money, I'll make sure they end up in rc5.
Otherwise, they'll need to wait until after 1.0 because I need to pay
bills in the meantime :)

> at this point there are a few reason's why the system can get un-optimized or
> just not-working.  One reason is that if libraries get updated that were
> STATICALLY linked in other packages, those packages don't get rebuilt
> automatically... this is not good. So packages that depend on it should be
> rebuilt... But there is one thing to think about... it's NOT always needed...
> for example if perl gets updated we don't want all packages that depend on it
> to get updated... so there has to be a flag in the ebuild-files that
> specifies wheter or not a package needs to be rebuilt if a dependancy gets
> updated... so for example add a ! to the dependancy-name... 

The static library example you describe should not break any packages, although
a recompile would allow them to potentially be better optimized.  Achim and I
have been dicussing how to implement auto-dep-rebuilding, but you probably
won't see it until Portage 1.7.  We have other more important features to
implement first.

> The second reason why the system gets unoptimized or uncomplete is due to
> changes in the USE variable... 

> Of cource we don't want the entire system to be rebuilt after echt
> USE-change... so we need "ebuild update" to remember the previous state of

It already records the USE, CXXFLAGS, CFLAGS and CHOST settings that were used
at compile-time.

> USE, and compare it to the current one. And after that it should rebuild ONLY
> the packages that are affected. For this another enhancement to ebuild-files
> is needed... a field to specify what USE-parameters affect the package (this
> also allows nice GUI's in the future to ask you if you want to toggle some
> USE-switches if you select the package).

> Another thing that would be nice is a way to see if packages got updated (not
> ebuild-files, but real sources).  This would allow people to easily see what
> ebuild-files have to be updated...  I know rock-linux allready has the script
> for it (to check on source-locations, for ALL versions available) which can
> be modified to check for NEWER versions only...

# emerge --pretend system
(view packages that need to be installed to make the system profile-compliant;
will only add a package to satisfy the profile)

# emerge --pretend update
(view all the packages that need to be installed to make the system completely up-to-date;
will upgrade older packages)

These features are currently experimental and should not be used without first
calling them with "--pretend" to make sure they aren't installing anything that
they shouldn't.  Right now, they could potentially remerge a newer version of
baselayout which would cause your /etc/passwd, /etc/group, etc to get wiped.

Also, Warren is currently working on a Gento Linux web update frontend called
"gentool", which is at version 0.0.1 and is quite nice.

> I'm sorry for bugging about missing things i'dd like to see... It's not that
> I'm too lazy to implement them myself, I would love to... but I need some
> practise on scripting for now...  Just think those additions would make
> gentoo really the king of distributions :)

Features like this are in the works, but we'll be adding config file management
and more fine-grained dep-strings next.  Then we'll have the necessary features
to safely handle auto-dep-rebuild features.

Best Regards,

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