Here is a draft of what we are looking for for the comprehensive
requirements document we need to develop. To help portage-ng
development, please expand on this document and post your
additions/improvements to this list. This doc will probably end up being
10-15 pages long...

portage-ng

This is the specification for portage-ng, a package manager/"ports"
system. portage-ng is intended to be able to perform the following tasks
on an individual host system: downloading sources or pre-compiled
packages from the Internet, configuration, compilation and installation
of sources according to user requirements, general package management.
In addition, portage-ng should be able to be easily extended to perform
tasks that would be expected of it in an enterprise, cluster, or other
kind of environment, which may include management of groups of systems
over the network.

architecture requirements:

1) facilitate parallel, community development
2) allow for easy extensibility and new feature additions over time
3) provide a coherent model for (meta)data representation and storage
4) will run on a wide variety of systems
5) will run efficiently even on modest hardware
6) in as much as possible, encourage and/or enforce the development of
high-quality, versatile and maintainable code
7) encourage/enforce separation of package metadata from specific build
steps and algorithms
8) allow for delivery of feature set that meets or exceeds expectations
of existing user community

design goals:

1) reflect the sensibilities of "ports" system designs
2) provide an easy-to-understand developer API
3) provide an open, transparent architecture that reflects UNIX design
philosophy
4) In every way possible, program should be malleable to allow
conformation to user needs and expectations,
both interface as well as the specific actions performed by the program.