Continuing in the series of issues raised during the previous package manager discussions, I'd like to continue by mentioning the tree format. At present, it isn't defined beyond "what the current portage supports", which is frankly a fairly silly way to do things. Following discussion in #gentoo-portage, I'd like to set out to change that.
My current idea is to draw up a formal specification of what ebuilds are allowed to do, and what to assume about the environment in which they run, as well as defining the formats of everything under profiles/, metadata.xml files, and other auxiliary information in the tree. I would envision the first version of this document to more or less codify existing practise, perhaps excluding some dubious tricks that are known to break in some cases. Generally, it should be possible to make the tree conform to the first version of the specification by changes no more significant than currently have QA bugs filed for them. It seems fairly obvious that any effort of this kind could potentially have implications, albeit hopefully very minor, across more or less all aspects of the tree, and so I'd like to seek as wide a range of input as possible before going ahead with it. The QA and Portage teams, based on my enquiries in IRC, seem broadly in favour, and I would imagine that this could be very helpful to Gentoo/ALT as well, so I'd like opinions from others at this point. Would you support such an effort, whether passively or actively? Would you oppose it? If so, why? Final implementation of it would I assume require the Council's approval; while I won't ask at this stage for a formal discussion I'd appreciate the views of its members on whether such an initiative is likely to pass. Any input is gratefully received. -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
