portage package ideas

supenguin · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 28 Jul 2002 Posts: 95

Just started using gentoo and I have a couple of ideas I'd like to toss out.

1. I really like portage, but right before starting to use Gentoo, I was messing with the encap package manager, and really liked it. Every program gets its own directory. Maybe have some way to have emerge build and install encap packages instead of tbz2 packages (that's what Gentoo uses, right?)

2. One thing I really like about encap was the idea of using the same package management tools on whatever (Unix-like) OS you are using. How hard would it be to port the whole portage tree over to *BSD, MacOS/X? Something kind of like the openpackages project. Maybe each available program could have a base ebuild, and then any OS's that require different ways to build could have a patch that would change it (example: gkrellm needs "make freebsd && make install" on FreeBSD and "make linux && make install" on Linux).

delta407 · Posted: Mon Jul 29, 2002 5:11 am Post subject:

1. Portage builds and "installs" into a directory inside of /var/tmp/portage/, which is then merged into the / (root) filesystem. No tarballs are created.

2. In short, Portage is the Gentoo package management system. If people want to make it run under different operating systems that have totally different underliyng structures, then go for it. However, Gentoo runs on several different architectures, so why not just run Gentoo instead?
_________________
I don't believe in witty sigs.

supenguin · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 28 Jul 2002 Posts: 95

1. But portage can still build and install from tarballs, right? emerge -b

2. A couple reasons. First, ever since I tried FreeBSD, and especially NetBSD, I've felt *BSD to be technically superior to Linux. Gentoo is in danger of changing that, however. Then there's OS/X. My wife does graphic design, so she needs something that can run Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, etc. So unless Gentoo PPC can run that stuff easily, OS/X would be great. She can do all her graphic design stuff, and can run all my *nix stuff.
_________________
We don't need no stinkin' signatures.

fmalabre · Guru Joined: 19 Jun 2002 Posts: 376 Location: Chicago

Lately, I'm looking closely at OS/X.
I just wonder if all the GNU stuff works well under OS/X.

If I go there, it would be my first time using a mac! My PC will still run Gentoo though

supenguin · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 28 Jul 2002 Posts: 95

GNU utilities should work OK on OS/X. Its a BSD, it comes with Perl by default. There's a project called Fink, that is some kind of package collection of open source software for OS/X. Of course, not having a Mac, I can't vouch for how well it works. Be nice if I had a Mac to try it with.

I should just shut up now before this gets WAY off topic.
_________________
We don't need no stinkin' signatures.