On Sat, 06 Sep 2014 13:00:03 -0400 "Anthony G. Basile" <bluen...@gentoo.org> wrote: > On 09/06/14 12:18, Ciaran McCreesh wrote: > > Well eix is buggy, PMS-violating and doesn't support EAPIs properly, > > and the utilities in gentoolkit and portage-utils are better > > implemented natively in a package manager. I don't know what elfix > > does, but if it's anything like the other three, I'd rather > > reimplement it in a PMS compliant manner for Paludis than to > > provide flaky external APIs that encourage people to write broken > > code... > > elfix contains revdep-pax which does what revdep-rebuild does, except > that it migrates PaX flags from executables to libraries and vice > versa.
There's a reason we reimplemented revdep-rebuild: doing it *properly* requires passing special information to the dependency resolver telling it not to reuse certain packages for breaking circular dependencies. > These sorts of utilites pop up over and over again. A lot of them are because Portage doesn't provide a decent API for users... > You cannot put every utility that needs package information into a > package manager. No, just the ones that do anything fiddly, and that certainly includes eix and most of gentoolkit. > An API for interoperability between PM's and other > tools is meaningful. Refusing to do so leads to the sort of comment > you see in https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=506276#c43. > > Ironically, the very standards I seek in GLEP 64 would benefit the > paludis world most. I'm not disagreeing with an API for interoperability, in principle. I just think the way you're going about it is all wrong, and we're all better not having an API at all than having a bad one that we'll have to support for all eternity. Here's a quick lesson, starting with bad design: for x in /var/db/pkg/*/* ; do cat $x/DESCRIPTION # etc But what if VDB isn't there? for x in $(pmtool get_vdb_path)/*/* ; do cat $x/DESCRIPTION But */* makes some strong assumptions about the filesystem layout. In particular, it's going to be wrong if we ever do multi-slot. So: for x in $(pmtool get_vdb_package_directories) ; do cat $x/DESCRIPTION But this is still very fragile. What if we switch to sqlite? for x in $(pmtool get_unique_ids_for_vdb_packages) ; do pmtool get_metadata_variable $x DESCRIPTION But hang on... We don't really want VDB. We want installed packages. (This is important, and it's not just a naming thing.) for x in $(pmtool get_unique_ids_for_installed_packages) ; do pmtool get_metadata_variable $x DESCRIPTION What if descriptions move to metadata.xml? for x in $(pmtool get_unique_ids_for_installed_packages) ; do pmtool get_description $x And finally, what if EAPI 7 changes things? It's probably best to error out. export PMTOOL_BARF_ON_UNKNOWN_EAPIS="1 2 3 4 5 6" for x in $(pmtool get_unique_ids_for_installed_packages) ; do pmtool get_description $x Now this is still fragile and makes all kinds of assumptions, and we could argue eternally about the naming, but it's a heck of a lot better than what we started off with. In particular, it's *very* high level, and relies upon the package mangler for everything involving parsing. -- Ciaran McCreesh
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