Random ideas about changes, their value, their impact

During the last month we got many arguments about how fundamental was one or another change to portage and how this or that had been a life change for many users.

I’m talking about the whole discussion about glep54 and the following one.

When it was first proposed I found the glep lacking details and given that some people were vehemently against it I asked to have it updated. Since some other people found the idea of improving our support for live ebuilds as whole (not just the versioning) interesting I tried to gather ideas and put them all into a draft. The thing got quite big and covered many steps needed, most of them not detailed yet.

Basically the live template draft aims to have portage do the following:

– let you automatically merge from a specific live branch
– have emerge –fetch work as supposed introducing a phase just for that
– let you track what you installed and possibly re-install as is
– have a way to generate automatically snapshot ebuilds and binpkgs in a non ambiguous way
– some more (like have portage show you which revision and from which branch comes what you installed on emerge -upv)

Glep 54 just aim to make sure versioning is theoretically and thoroughly correct, no matter how crazy overlays, upstream and package maintainer could be. To make an example, right now if someone wants to provide a live ebuild he could prepare an ebuild with a large version value (say 9999) and assume nothing bigger would appear, version usually are small values like 1.2.3.
Now, nothing forbids to have a version that is, say, 10000, making invalid the assumption cat/pkg-9999 is the higher value. The glep54 comes with a solution for this issue, have a new prefix to state that he ebuild is live, thus has to be considered above all the others within it’s range. This change has to be folded within a EAPI change or even better to a file extension change as stated in glep55 since it’s as simple to state as radical: older portage, not knowing anything about what this prefix is, will issue a warning.

Installing from live sources is completely unsupported thus those ebuild are rightfully p.masked and their use is quite specific. The current amount of them is scarce: 90 on 26130 ebuilds are live.

So, if you got the question about if you’d approve this proposal and consider implementing that and all the changes due that would follow or just put it on hold till it would be more useful what would you do?

A pragmatic approach would either be either reject it since does pretty much nothing in the big scheme (0.003 is nearly nothing) a less pragmatic approach, due the tendency to thinker, would be just try to make it more useful so it could be of appeal to a wider interest…

Probably the same time would have been better spent on things that are more interesting like have a better way to state what a dependency is (if it is something I’ll need to link to, something that I need to run) to ease the life of our embedded arches (say ppc, arm, sh, mips) or to fully support multislot and multiabi so we can avoid emul-linux on amd64 and have ppc64 being able to run xlc w/out many annoyances *cough*, or start thinking about how to enable pgo as widely as possible since it appears to make the difference in certain situations (e.g. firefox).

One thought on “Random ideas about changes, their value, their impact”

  1. Many live ebuilds live outside the tree in overlays. For KDE, Gnome and X11 alone we have several hundred live ebuilds; I myself have about 300 live packages installed on my system. There is many more in the other overlays.

    They may be unsupported, but there is demand for them, and it would be great if Portage provided a way to maintain them properly. For example, not having to rebuild *all* of them but only those which changed would already be huge step in the right direction.

    Just counting the few live ebuilds that actually made it into the tree is painting a wrong picture here and misses the point, IMHO.

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