Many things were discussed in the last round of this thread (Paludis and Profiles, in case anyone missed it), and many useful points raised. One of these, which seems to have been largely missed in amongst the other noise, forms the basis of this proposal. It is in some ways more and in some ways less intrusive than the previous proposal, and is also completely package-manager-agnostic.
In short, I would like to suggest replacing sys-apps/portage atoms in the base and default-linux profiles with virtual/portage, and removing the python dependencies from them. For most users this would have an effective zero change, since the default provider for virtual/portage is sys-apps/portage, and the python dependency will be pulled in by Portage when calculating system deps. According to my understanding, this should also produce no change when building release media, due to both Portage and Python being in packages.build. The only change introduced by this is that it becomes possible to bootstrap a system with a different package manager simply by installing it before 'system'. There are a couple more changes needed to allow this -- namely that a few system packages have old dependencies on >=portage-2.0.49, but these can be resolved seperately. Any problems caused by packages depending implicitly upon Python will show up only on systems not using Portage, and can be easily fixed with the cooperation of package maintainers. I would like to think that this proposal addresses most of the concerns raised in the last thread -- it implies nothing about support for any other package manager, and introduces nothing that could cause problems for Portage users, while still allowing alternative package managers to use the tree without needing Portage installed. I am also aware that this falls roughly under what the Council was asked to discuss in its June meeting, but since that seems to have not happened, I'm bringing it up anyway, since I would like to get something done here. Comments? -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
