Re: [gentoo-dev] Integrating Portage with other package managers

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Wed, Mar 7, 2018 at 12:52 PM, Alec Warner <antarus@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Perl/g-cpan is a project is in a
> similar space and basically reads perl CPAN metadata to generate stub
> ebuilds.
> Portage tracks these stub ebuilds (and so for example, it tracks what these
> cpan packages install and can remove them afterwards.)
>

This is the right general approach.  If somebody were willing to do
the work I'm sure it would be useful if portage had a more generic
interface for stuff like this, such as a way to do plugins/etc.  The
idea would be to run some outside package manager in some kind of
sandbox, then create a binary package from what gets installed.

Everybody I know has these sorts of complaints about language-based
PMs, whether they prefer Ubuntu, or Debian, or CentOS, or whatever.
Nobody wants random programs downloading random stuff and dropping
orphan files all over their filesystem with no way to identify these
or clean them up.  They're usually written by the same sorts of people
who tell you to pipe curl into sudo bash...

-- 
Rich