[gentoo-portage-dev] Re: search functionality in emerge

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

devsk <funtoos@yahoo.com> posted
396349.98307.qm@web31708.mail.mud.yahoo.com, excerpted below, on  Sun, 23
Nov 2008 21:01:40 -0800:

> Why is a portage daemon such a bad thing? Or hard to do? I would very
> much like a daemon running on my system which I can configure to sync
> the portage tree once a week (or month if I am lazy), give me a summary
> of hot fixes, security fixes in a nice email, push important
> announcements and of course, sync caches on detecting changes (which
> should be trivial with notify daemons all over the place) etc. Why is it
> such a bad thing?
> 
> Its crazy to think that security updates need to be pulled in Linux.

Well, this is more a user list discussion than a portage development 
discussion, but...

For one thing, it's terribly inefficient to keep a dozen daemons running 
checking only a single thing each, each week, when we have a cron 
scheduling daemon, and it's both efficient and The Unix Way (R) to setup 
a script to do whatever you need it to do, and then have the cron daemon 
run each of a dozen different scripts once each week, instead of having 
those dozen different daemons running constantly when they're only active 
once a week.

IOW, it only requires a manual pull if you've not already setup cron to 
invoke an appropriate script once a week, and that involves only a single 
constantly running daemon, the cron daemon of your choice.

Now, perhaps it can be argued that there should be a package that 
installs such a pre-made script.  For all I know, maybe there is one 
already.  And perhaps it can be argued that said script, if optional, 
should at least be mentioned in the handbook.  I couldn't argue with the 
logic of either of those.  But there's no reason to run yet another 
daemon constantly, when (1) it's not needed constantly, and (2), there's 
already a perfectly functional way of scheduling something to run when 
it /is/ needed, complete with optional results mailing, etc, if it's 
scripted to do that.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman