* [gentoo-portage-dev] Re: layout.conf: What's our opinion?
@ 2014-01-21 2:36 99% ` W. Trevor King
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From: W. Trevor King @ 2014-01-21 2:36 UTC (permalink / raw
To: gentoo-portage-dev
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On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 12:05:30PM +0100, Sebastian Luther wrote:
> Currently layout.conf is not under PMS control. This basically means
> that every PM (or version thereof) may support different keys and
> assign different meanings to them.
Standardizing in the PMS sounds like a good idea, for situations where
a consensus can be reached.
> Portage's behavior for unknown keys in layout.conf is to ignore them
> without a warning.
That makes sense, and is a good practice for forwards-compatibility
[1]. Repositories providing custom keys (or package managers
supporting custom keys) do so with the understanding that there may be
incompatibilities. Namespaced custom keys (portage-eclass-masters?)
would help avoid accidental collision. Versioning the layout.conf key
spec would also be useful, so a PM in strict-mode could warn “unknown
keys x, y, and z in a v1.2 layout.conf. I only understand v1.0, and
it's possible that these keys have been added in subsequent versions”.
> The bad thing about this is that some layout.conf keys portage
> currently supports, may render the repository unusable for a PM if
> it doesn't support them.
Can you give an example of the breakage? Maybe I just haven't been
listening in the right places. If the problem is that the
repositories *need* a custom key that is not universally supported,
then that seems like something the repository authors should expect.
> After discussing this one IRC I came to the conclusion that we just
> disagree on how we should handle additions to layout.conf.
>
> Basically it's either
> 1) "We add things as we see fit." or
> 2) "We should only add things if absolutely necessary.".
Locking everything down completely seems overly harsh, and makes it
harder to experiment with new features. Why not:
1.5) We can add custom keys as we see fit under the ‘portage-*’
namespace.
* Portable repositories should not rely on them until they land
in the PMS under a new layout.conf version, at which time the
‘portage-’ prefix will be removed.
* Portage will recognize any newly standardized keys under their
old ‘portage-*’ name to allow repositories to gracefully
transition to the standardized names.
Cheers,
Trevor
[1]: http://www.w3.org/2001/tag/doc/versioning-20070326.html#iddiv470454016
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