[gentoo-portage-dev] portage-ng ideas

[Jeremy Maitin-Shepard <jbms@gentoo.org>]

I have the following ideas for portage-ng requirements.  If one or more
of them has already been stated and/or discussed, please disregard it.

 - More powerful functionality during the merge phase than simple file
   and directory creation/replacement.  Specifically, it would be
   useful to support other actions like user or group creation.
   Furthermore, it would be useful to support addition of new `action'
   types (without modifying portage code), i.e. in an ebuild or an
   eclass or some other system designed for this purpose.  This would
   be useful for things such as the emacs site lisp, /etc/init.d/
   scripts, kernel modules, /etc/env.d/ scripts, /etc/modules.d/
   scripts.  The current practice for init.d, env.d and modules.d seems
   to be to rebuild the cached files relating to these directories
   after every package merge; support of `custom' `action' types would
   be a more elegant solution.

 - Possibly improving efficiency by creating a portage temporary
   directory (or allow the user to create and specify the existence of
   such a directory) on each filesystem (or on several filesystem) to
   which portage will install files.  By using bind mounts, the image
   temp directory could be constructed so that the files that will be
   installed on a particular filesystem for which there is a temporary
   directory would be installed in the portage temporary directory of
   that filesystem.  This would allow the merge phase to create hard
   links (or move) rather than copying, which would be faster and allow
   for less temporary use of disk space.  I realize though that the
   implementation difficulty of this might outweigh the advantages.
   Furthermore, it might be problematic if portage did not auto-clean
   (auto-delete) the files with link counts > 1.  Now that I consider
   this though, I realize that during the build phase, files will be
   installed in a temporary directory on a different filesystem, and so
   there is still the need to copy.

-- 
Jeremy Maitin-Shepard

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