From: Simon ARNAUD <Maz@...>
Date: 2003-03-19T16:33:27+09:00
Subject: Re: Gentoo Administration

On Tue, 18 Mar 2003 02:07:54 -0800, Tom Payne wrote:

> As for Ruby packges from the RAA they still vary a lot in their build
> mechanisms, which is a shame. Specifically, most don't support the
> "make DESTDIR=/x/y/z install" idiom which makes writing correct and
> up-to-date ebuilds a chore.

Agreed completly. However, we could help on making most use this schema.
If devs are inclined to accept changes. Also, some use make, some use
setup.rb (or install.rb), and some just need copying.
 
> I suggest that when 1.8.0 comes out we contribute ebuilds for it and
> the commonly used RAA packages. In my experience, ebuilds are MUCH
> more likely to be accepted if they are 100% correct. Partial or buggy
> ebuilds are a real pain for the portage maintainers.

Agreed too. What about having a parallel dev-ruby tree which we could work
on, and submit already tested ebuilds by a handfull of people ?
We could organize a #gentoo-ruby, or something like that, and a cvs tree
somewhere.
 
> I don't think this is a good idea. Maintaining parallel Ruby and
> Python versions of portage would be a nightmare: portage changes
> regularly and keeping both versions in sync would be problematic. The
> portage hackers already know Python and reasonably would see no reason
> to change.

Re-read my point, we do agree on this one :).

> As for re-writing in C: why? The slow parts of emerge are
> fetching, unpacking, and compiling, none of which would be speeded up
> by using C. It would just make it much much harder to modify and
> improve the program.

The only reason I see in rewriting it in C is getting rid of python in
'system'. Otherwise, I do agree, speed improvement would not be tremendous
(if any), and maintenance would be a lot harder.
The reason I would like this is to get small gentoo (hd space wise) up and
running, but I guess it would be even better if they splitted 'system'
into 'running system' (eg: kernel, binutils, glibc ...) and 'building
system' (eg: gcc, python, portage).

> One of the many great things about Gentoo is that both the portage
> tree and the package database are stored in plain text (unlike, for
> example, RPM). This makes querying it really easy even from the
> command line (e.g. you can list installed packages by typing "ls
> /var/db/pkg/*/*/*.ebuild | cut -d/ -f5-6"). This makes writing a Ruby
> query tool really easy too.

Agreed
 
> Regards,
> 
> Tom

cheers,

Maz