On Sat, 28 Dec 2019 11:14:15 +0000
Michael 'veremitz' Everitt <gentoo@veremit.xyz> wrote:

> I know I'm gonna be shot down in flames, because $heresy, but here is where
> a package 'database' would actually work quite well, because you can
> trivially create a query that pulls this data out, and sorts it by package
> category or maintainer or whatever you like .

Oh, and once upon a time, there was actually a trick you could do to
make portage keep its metadata caches in an SQLite database, which had
its benefits, and I even had a rough tool I wrote in ruby and shared on
the old (defunct) wiki that helped do quick database queries.

But the trick actually makes portage slower in multiple ways, and it
never really got widespread love.

( Though I would argue how the data was stored was also inadequate for
a lot of other tasks one might want to do with a database, like,
keeping DEPEND stored in its string format )