Hi Gerion,

Gerion Entrup <gerion.entrup@flump.de> writes:

>> Yes, that makes a lot of sense.  The R overlay follows this model.  Most
>> of the ebuilds are automated.  When an ebuild generation fails, we add
>> the ebuild manually, understand it and then update the generator to
>> cover it in the future.
>
> Is this possible in all cases? I think of adding custom patches,
> appropriate mapping of dependencies, check for things like desktop
> icon cache...

That's too complex to handle automatically.  Luckily, in R overlay, such
packages are less than 5%.  An ebuild generator is based on the
observation that many language-specific packages are trivial to fetch,
compile and install.

>> > I'm only "maintaining" an overlay so maybe I'm  missing experience
>> > but I often have wished a tool that automatically parses the language specific
>> > packaging files and is able to generate a primitive ebuild out of that.
>> > Maybe it even can do this in an interactive way:
>> > "Hey, upstream needs the dependency 'foo'. In the Gentoo packages I have found
>> > 'dev-bar/foo' and 'dev-util/foo'. What is the correct one?"
>> 
>> Yes, that's the way R overlay is working.  And I have a similar plan and
>> proof-of-concept solution for the Java Maven overlay.
>
> Nice to hear. I think, it is meaningful to solve all generation with one
> tool. Maybe it can even "recognize" the used build system and package
> database. Is this your plan, too?

No, I don't think it possible as far as I can see...  That would be a
strong AI.

Yours,
Benda