On Dec 31, 1:11 pm, "Ted Kosan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Ondrej wrote:
> > Nice thing about this is that there is no database, nothing. Just
> > plain files, that
> > can be fixed by hand.
>
> > How would portage improve this?
>
> Portage is just editable text files too. I do not have any experience
> with Debian so it may also do the following things I describe below.
> If a Debian approach does things like this too, that would be great
> :-)
>
> Portage vs. spkg:
>
> When I look at the instructions for creating a spkg:
>
> http://www.sagemath.org/doc/html/prog/node24.html
>
> The first thing that catches my eye is
>
> "(b)
> Put your files in that directory."
>
> So where do the files come from? I took a spkg at random (readline),
> extracted it, and tried to find out where to obtain its source code
> from. Here is all the documentation that the readline spkg contained:
>
> "$ cat SPKG.txt
> Deleted some files from the doc directory from the standard distro,
> since it took tons of space;
> didn't delete anything else."
>
> I am not sure who last worked on readline because it does not say. If
> someone gave me the task of updating this spkg, I guess I would start
> googling to find out were to obtain the source code.
>
> In contrast to this, a portage package contains a script (called an
> ebuild) that automatically downloads the source code needed to build
> an application from wherever it lives on the Internet, checks the
> archive's integrity, unarchives it, applies patches, builds it, tests
> it, and installs it. Beyond this, all packages that the package
> depends on are checked to make sure they are present and if they are
> not, each one is installed first using the same mechanism.
>
<snip ebuild>
>
> If someone gave me the task of updating this portage-based package to
> the latest version, I would have a good idea of where to start even if
> I had never seen this package before.
>
> Anyway, the main thing I like about the portage approach is that it is
> very systematic. If a Debian approach is systematic like this, that
> would be great too.
>
> From my point of view, simple = a well thought out system :-)
>
Ondrej makes some very points in his answer. Let me add some stuff
from the Gentoo user perspective. Your example is a very important
system
package very well maintained. Even so as Ondrej the Changelog could
be better and that's a good changelog. How many times I have seen
stuff
pushed without a proper changelog, too many really.
There are quite a few crufty ebuilds out there especially packages
that
are not widely used. You could in theory push a tarball with modified
sources
on the mirrors if you wanted too. spkg, deb, ebuilds all can be abused
what
is really important is quality assurance and discipline.
In the case of the readline spkg and a few other the goal is tarball
size reduction
which is not unreasonable but there should a place with a detail of
what was
removed. A gziped or bziped text file doesn't weight much.
Now if you are a Gentoo user will you be a guinea pig for my sage
ebuild
relying on a number of package available in Gentoo when it is ready?
I'll probably post in http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=201321
when I have something that I think is OK. It will be crufty and may
take
more time than I think :)
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