Re: [gentoo-dev] portage database management

[Ingo Krabbe <i.krabbe@dokom.net>]

On Sat, Feb 01, 2003 at 07:16:44PM +1000, Rendhalver [Peter Brown] wrote:
> ah ok so you want to put the actual portage tree into a database yes?

nope, I think it would be much nicer to portage to create a mirror
image of the portage tree in a database, together with all textual
information available.  I want to leave the portage as it is for
installing and updating packages but I want to be able to get events
from portage when new packages arrive (rsync), are installed (emerge)
or uninstalled (unmerge) or updated (emerge -u), so I can keep track of
it.

Of course it would be a solution to manage everything in a database, hmm
it is a tree you know, a big tree in recent times, so it should be a
database object.  But the evolution of portage was filesystem oriented,
which is understandable for portability, stability and transparency.  At
least the filesystem is a database too, a slow one though, but fast
enough for the installation purposes, measured against the compilation
and download times.

I often bothered about the problem of searching a package by keyword or
package name (emerge -s foo) and (emerge -S foo), when I just want to
get a quick overview about a topic or want to look up this new package I
just heard of in this newgroup yesterday.

This operation takes much too long for my taste and thats what I like to
keep in a database.  I know there are textual database systems like
htref, but I don't understand their installation and configuration
syntax.  Hmm, I'm a C Programmer you know, it is much easier to me to
put everything in a Berkeley DB put a job in the background and fire
some events or raise some signals.

BYE INGO

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