Il 23/02/2018 20:37, Alec Warner ha scritto:
My general observation is that Gentoo is not successful as an organization
about deprecating and removing things. One area where Gentoo has done well is
in EAPI and in PMS itself, with mostly-clear versioning and standards and
whatnot. But in general if something worked 15 years ago, it probably still
works today (doubly so for sys-apps/portage).
There is a different question when building a tool like yours if it is worth the effort to support things that are 15 years old and are possibly not used (particularly in cases where functionality was replaced). I'd recommend starting with the basic implementation and adding support for the 'older' formats when users ask for them; but this is mostly a trade-off in efforts. If your goal is to build
a "100% compatible" tool then you will probably need to support these edge cases.
You have a very good point.
I'd like to be complete (it's a side effect of working in formal methods), but
it's quite unrealistic as I am the only developer in this project, and it's
true that there are few technical design choices that were made in portage that
I'd be happier not to implement.
I'd like to implement the /etc/portage/repos.conf system to remove as many hard
coded references to /usr/portage in my code as possible.
Moreover, the /etc/portage/repos.conf system looks nice, modular with explicit
dependencies and it almost unifies all the repositories (I don't really
understand the need of a DEFAULT section).
If possible, I'd rather avoid implementing things that are deprecated, but like
you pointed out, few are (portage seems to be always expanding with
new/alternative functionalities).
The ones that are, like the /etc/portage/package.keywords file, seem to be
still used (I've got a request to support it in my get_installation.sh script).
Additionally, there are two systems that I did not want to implement but had
to: the IUSE_IMPLICIT and USE_EXPAND.
I didn't find any good documentation on these systems (nor the PMS nor
https://dev.gentoo.org/%7Ezmedico/portage/doc/man/portage.5.html are very clear
on the subject -- the PMS is still clearer), I tested a lot and looked at the
portage implementation...
I don't understand the reason to implement these systems with bash variables
expanded with prefixes, while many of the USE flag manipulation is done with
dedicated files (use.*, package.use.*).
It really felt like an old design choice kept there because it worked, but
which could be simplified.
On a similar topic, does anyone still have USE-related variables in his
/etc/env.d folder? (https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/USE_ORDER)
It seems to me that portage's current effort is to have all configuration files
in /etc/portage or in the profile.
Best,
Michael Lienhardt
