Re: [gentoo-dev] Split KDE packages?

[Dan Armak <danarmak@gentoo.org>]

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Hello everyone,

This is my plan :-)

I understand now that so many people have requested it that splitting the 
packages (in a way that doesn't harm those who want the full packages!) is an 
important feature. I wanted to explain to everyone what my outlook on this 
is, so I'm quoting my comments from bug #11123 (including one I added just 
now):

- ------- Additional Comment #1 From Dan Armak 2002-11-29 13:46 -------
This has been discussed before. Formally if you want to call it that - on the 
mailing lists at least. 
 
There are two ways of implementing this. 
 
Under the current portage architecture, we'd need to use separate, autonomous 
ebuilds for every 'subpackage'. This however raises a problem: 
 
A kde configure script takes as much as a minute or more to run. Today when 
you emerge all of kde you run ~17 configure scripts, i.e. as much as 20 
minutes goes there (of course everything depends on the speed of the 
machine).
If all kde-base packages are split into separate subpackage ebuilds, you'll 
get hundreds of subpackages (200+). That means an extra 200 minutes -- 3.5 
hours -- added to the compilation time of all of KDE. And most people do want 
the whole of kde. This is unacceptable. 
 
There were various proposals of caching the configuration info, or sharing it 
somewhere in /var/tmp. But all that is complex, inelegant and unpleasant to 
implement and maintain. 
 
The other possibility is having a single ebuild provide real 'subpackages' any 
combination of which could be emerged by request. However there would only be 
a single workdir, so unless you deleted /var/tmp/portage in the middle of it, 
'emerge kde' would run configure a minimal amount of times. 
 
However this requires new portage features: fex. keeping in /var/db/pkg the 
info of which subpackages are installed, and recognizing a variables/use flag 
for that purpose. 
 
Someday I hope this can be done. 

- ------- Additional Comment #8 From Dan Armak 2003-01-29 08:17 -------
 
It is not a problem to make an ebuild compile a subset of all available 
subpackages. <snip>
 
Now the best solution IMHO would be to implement 'subpackages' as i described 
before. An ebuild could then divide the files it installs into a number of 
'subpackages'. If the user requested merging certain subpackages, the ebuild 
would (should) be smart enough to take only the minimal action required to 
compile those subpackages. And if the user requested everything (as in an 
ordinary emerge command), the ebuild would be smart enough not to repeat 
actions (ie not to run configure more than once). 
 
This obviously needs portage-side support and so must come after the present 
(pre-1.4-release) feature freeze ends. I'll try to add such support then, 
meanwhile I'm dealing with bugs only... 

- -- 
Dan Armak
Gentoo Linux developer (KDE)
Matan, Israel
Public GPG key: http://www.gentoo.org/~danarmak/danarmak-gpg-public.key
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