Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] Re: Re: portage-ng roadmap?

["Paul de Vrieze" <pauldv@gentoo.org>]

> do you think end-users need all ebuilds ? I have a laptop, and fetching
> the whole portage tree doesn't make any sence, since I emerge only a few
> apps. On the other hand, I'd like to fetch a "pre-computed" cache or
> world file, and fetch only ebuilds when necessary (emerging a package
> for example). Those "emerge rsync" are way too long, and can be
> drasticly reducted using a different way of thinking.
>
> Of course, the whole portage tree could be installed, as it is in FreeBSD ;)

You're right, they probably don't. My system will be quite modular and I image
a new tree, maybe I'll implement it in the initial release. One concept I'm
thinking about is something I call xpack (where xbuild is the extension of
ebuilds that should be guaranteed to work with the new parser). This basically
is a text based packaging format (like tar, but actually diffeable), that
would contain all parts needed for an ebuild (source is optional). Such a file
would make things a lot easier to manage and to download on demand.

While my main focus will not be on ondemand downloading of xpacks (ebuilds is
pointless) it should be fairly trivial to generate metadata files for the
packages contained, maybe even on a category level. The transfer size could
still be sizeable though. I believe that introduction of xpack files
containing everything needed for an ebuild (except the manifest and
metadata.xml) allready reduces the amount of files in the tree enormously. It
also helps in being able to easilly remove unused patches ;-).

Paul

--
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net


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