Gentoo News

The Gentoo Council held a meeting on March 12, 2009. The items discussed were:

EAPI-3 Proposals:

Note: The following two proposals were discussed before it was realized that there was not sufficient time to discuss all of them. At that point a call for objections to any of the proposals was asked for, and none were made. A full list of proposals for EAPI 3 follow.

• New phase (pkg_pretend): This phase is most useful for displaying conflicting USE flags at dependency resolution time (pretend), though it has various other uses so that errors about installing the package can be displayed before installation of packages begin.
  Conclusion: Approved for the draft.
• [flag(+/-)] USE dependencies: This may be needed when one wishes to depend on a package with a certain USE flag but if the USE flag is not present in that package assume it is on or off (+ and - respectively).
  Conclusion: Approved for the draft.
• Multislot Dependency Specifications: This allows ebuilds to tell the package manager that runtime dependencies are not swappable (:1 installed at runtime can't be removed even though :2 'satisfies' the dependency).
• PROPERTIES mandatory in cache: Some information provided by this variable is useful at --pretend time (interactive packages).
• DEFINED_PHASES mandatory in cache: Same reasons as for PROPERTIES, but is also useful for determining the phases a package provides with just the cache.
• Provide a default src_install prototype: Get rid of the need for the src_install functions with just emake install in them. Some discussion is needed to clear up issues with a DOCS variable for extra documentation and a list of docs to automatically get installed.
• Provide a docompress function: This function serves as a replacement for prepalldocs. docompress can optionally compress files in /usr/share/doc according to a set of inclusion and exclusion lists.
• Provide an '-r' option to dodoc: Providing a way to put dodoc in recursive mode is widely accepted.
• Make doins preserve symlinks: This obsoletes the cp -R constructs frequently seen and is easy to implement.
• Limit values in $USE to those in $IUSE: Certain USE_EXPAND flags may be in USE even if they aren't specifically set in IUSE. Eliminate this.

The Council agreed to have portage implement as many of these as possible in a month and then make that EAPI 3.

Technical issues:

• GLEP 54: Thomas Anderson sent out a comparison of GLEP 54 and the liveebuild proposals. Among those discussing GLEP 54 there was a general consensus that there was nothing wrong with it as a first step to get correct ordering. Luca Barbato commented that all he was concerned about was that there was not enough 'meat' to the GLEP.
  Conclusion: Doug Goldstein and Luca Barbato intend to write a GLEP to handle the second part of the problem, making the revision available to ebuilds/package manager/users.
• GLEP 55: Petteri Räty, Zac, and Ciaran were supposed to benchmark the various proposals and report back. Zac Medico did not write the code for portage so Petteri Räty had nothing to report on this issue. Ciaran commented that the solutions other than GLEP 55 had a 50% slowdown in the valid cache situation compared to GLEP55, but did not post the raw numbers or the patches used.
  Conclusion: Zac Medico needs to benchmark the proposals in portage.

Open floor:

• Migration of KEYWORDS from ebuilds to profiles: Ned Ludd brought this up, but it came up in the middle of agenda items so was not talked about much. Some points were made that such a scheme would require a git conversion, but nothing was agreed upon.