Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] Environment Whitelisting

[Kristian Benoit <kbenoit@opersys.com>]

On Tue, 2005-08-23 at 08:28 +0900, Jason Stubbs wrote:
> On Tuesday 23 August 2005 06:40, Brian Harring wrote:
> > On Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 11:33:23PM +0200, Marius Mauch wrote:
> > > Theoretical discussions about this are pointless IMO without
> > > numbers/facts to back things up.
> >
> > I'd posit theroetical discussions about this are pointless without
> > getting ebuild dev's to give a yay/nay on whether they want it or not;
> > not much for trying to force it down their throats if they don't want
> > it (more work, essentially).
> 
> I don't really see what it has to do with ebuild devs... We're talking about 
> the user's environment leaking into the portage build environment, no? 
> Environment vars used by ebuilds can/should be set by users in a portage 
> configuration file rather than being added to the environment. The only 
> issue i see here is user customizations - fex, a hypothetical colorgcc that 
> gets its config info from the env.

That's exactly what I was saying, we filter the environment to let only
portage's variables (USE, FEATURE, ...) pass through. But the user may
specify a bunch variables that will pass through. Ex:

$ FOO=bar USE=X emerge vim

vim's ebuild wont see the variable FOO but will see USE.
But if someone run:

$ PORTAGE_USER_VARS="FOO" FOO=bar USE=X emerge vim

The ebuild will see both FOO and USE.
But suppose that foo has 10 depencies and I want FOO to be defined only
for vim. I can write /etc/portage/package.env.d/app-editors/vim:

BAR=$TMP/bar
FOO=$BAR/foo
PORTAGE_USER_VARS="$PORTAGE_USER_VARS FOO"

Then if I run:

$ TMP=/home/me USE=X emerge vim

The ebuild will see both USE and FOO but not BAR and TMP.

It could also be only one file (/etc/portage/package.env):

app-editors/vim  "FOO BAR"
app-...

then FOO and BAR will be defined when running the ebuild if defined in
the env.

Or:

app-editors/vim	 'FOO=bar BAR="bla bla"'


Which one do you prefer ?


I think this give more freedom to the user than white/blacklisting and
provide clean environment to the ebuilds. Plus no need for the package
managers to manage white/blacklist.


Kristian

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