Gentoo 2006.0 Feature Requests

Message

chrisaw · Post by **chrisaw** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 10:22 am

Well someone had to start it

Did a quick search and got no hits so here i am. It's brilliant that you guys are sorting portage out to be much faster =) Always thought the old file method is a bit obselete for gentoo for nevertheless easier to manage most would argue. So, my requests are:-

* An official frontend to portage.

... I know Gentoo is all about the power of the console and i am a console freak I must confess. But i was using Debian for a few days and the frontend for the package system is brilliant. It has a GUI for the parts of selecting and downloading the packages and then opens up a "virtual" terminal for the actual package compiling (quite like porthole).

* A creator name field for ebuilds so that we know who created what ebuilds. This helps in 2 ways, firstly it lets us see who's been doing the most work with portage and so know who to thank and it also allows us to know quickly who originally created the ebuild so that we can tell them about any problems that may exist with it. Perhaps where the notes are usually it could say "This ebuild was brought to you by ..............."? =)

* Make portage use binaries only... erm... naa forget that

Seriously, apart from those top 2 just keep doing what your doing

Anyone else have any ideas or requests?

nlindblad · Post by **nlindblad** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 10:44 am

What do you mean? Gentoo itself is not versioned as upgrades occur incremental, the only versioned thing is the Live-CD.

Q-collective · Post by **Q-collective** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 10:52 am

Making ebuilds is becomming almost an impossible task for newlings, so a GUI (wizard?) for creating an ebuild would be neat imho.

Q-collective · Post by **Q-collective** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 10:53 am

nlindblad wrote:What do you mean? Gentoo itself is not versioned as upgrades occur incremental, the only versioned thing is the Live-CD.

Yeah well, that wasn't his point really.
Call it Gentoo 2006.0 or call it portage 3.0, doesn't really care that much.

omp · Post by **omp** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 10:57 am

Just like nlindblad said, Gentoo itself, unlike most other distros, does not have versions. The Live CDs are versioned because every once in a while new Live CDs are releaced with more up-to-date packages.

To get an up-to-date Gentoo system all you need to do is run this every once in a while:

Code: Select all

emerge --sync
emerge -Duva world

Also, the changes you asked for wouldn't have anything to do with a new Gentoo version.

If I understand correctly, you are asking for a GUI front-end for portage? I doubt this will happen because Gentoo comes without X.

As for the ebuilds suggestion, this can simply be implemented by the developers adding comments to the new ebuilds they create.

nlindblad · Post by **nlindblad** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 11:07 am

You're welcome to write a GTK/QT/ncurses GUI to front-end portage if you like...

I see no reason to use it though, but I guess that's a matter of taste and philosophy...

omp · Post by **omp** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 11:09 am

nlindblad wrote:You're welcome to write a GTK/QT/ncurses GUI to front-end portage if you like...

I see no reason to use it though, but I guess that's a matter of taste and philosophy...

AFAIK there are already GUI front-ends for portage.

omp · Post by **omp** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 11:13 am

* app-portage/portagemaster
Homepage: http://portagemaster.sourceforge.net/
Description: A java portage browser and installer

* app-portage/kentoo
Homepage: http://www.ralfhoelzer.com/kentoo.html
Description: KDE Portage frontend

* app-portage/kuroo
Homepage: http://guitoo.sourceforge.net
Description: A KDE Portage frontend

* app-portage/porthole
Homepage: http://porthole.sourceforge.net
Description: A GTK+-based frontend to Portage

nlindblad · Post by **nlindblad** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 11:18 am

omp wrote:* app-portage/portagemaster
Homepage: http://portagemaster.sourceforge.net/
Description: A java portage browser and installer

* app-portage/kentoo
Homepage: http://www.ralfhoelzer.com/kentoo.html
Description: KDE Portage frontend

* app-portage/kuroo
Homepage: http://guitoo.sourceforge.net
Description: A KDE Portage frontend

* app-portage/porthole
Homepage: http://porthole.sourceforge.net
Description: A GTK+-based frontend to Portage

Yeah, I guessed there would be (strange if there weren't). Add in a ncurses one and I might try it out...

omp · Post by **omp** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 11:25 am

nlindblad wrote:Yeah, I guessed there would be (strange if there weren't). Add in a ncurses one and I might try it out...

To tell you the truth, I think an ncurses one wouldn't be too good. This GUI ones might be good for finding programs and such, but I still prefer plain old 'emerge'.

nlindblad · Post by **nlindblad** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 11:33 am

omp wrote:
nlindblad wrote:Yeah, I guessed there would be (strange if there weren't). Add in a ncurses one and I might try it out...
To tell you the truth, I think an ncurses one wouldn't be too good. This GUI ones might be good for finding programs and such, but I still prefer plain old 'emerge'.

I'd like a nice ncurses one that allowed me to use emerge --search, esearch or eix to search for packages and browse them in a little more flexible way, and displaying a little statistics over packages installed/number of dependencies a chosen package has, etc.

micko · Post by **micko** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 11:44 am

A suggestion for the new livecd: Ndiswrapper. Actually I'm not sure if it already is there, but if not, it should. Ok, there can't be all the windows drivers on the cd, but people could download those beforehand on a usb-disk etc...

Otherwise I think the system is perfect. =)

LucaSpiller · Post by **LucaSpiller** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 11:46 am

* Release dates in ebuilds

At the moment Portage checks for updates by checking the version numbers in the name. Having a field containing the release data would be good as it would prevent the issues with WINE that have been experienced (CVS releases thought to be newer than 0.9).

chrisaw · Post by **chrisaw** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 12:20 pm

Yea i'm aware of the versioning system for gentoo but as Q-collective nicely put it that wasn't really my point

Y'know, there should be another forum section for feature requests

Could be somewhere for devs to go for inspiration

Edit: Yea there are several frontends out there but it'd be nice to have a Gentoo official one. One that allows you full control over the wonderful system that is portage. Personally i love the emerge command but it'd still be nice to have a nice GUI for when i don't have time to mess around =)

Edit 2: Wow! I like that idea about ebuild dates, that'd make CVS installing a breeze =) It'd be pretty simple to implement as far as im aware too, if ebuild1 > ebuild2 then.... (yea im a basic programmer but ya get the idea

)

mark_alec · Post by **mark_alec** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 12:51 pm

chrisaw wrote:Y'know, there should be another forum section for feature requests Could be somewhere for devs to go for inspiration

bugs.gentoo.org is the place to make feature requests.

chrisaw · Post by **chrisaw** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 1:00 pm

See that's fair enough but it doesn't seem quite right posting feature requests in a bugs section =S Just something off putting about it. Maybe that's just me :S But it would be nice to be able to just see feature requests and not have to sift through bugs too

playfool · Post by **playfool** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 2:18 pm

Last I checked this couldn't be done, but I would love a feature to explain the use flags in each ebuild.

As I have posted earlier blindly using USE X when something X related can get enabled isn't a good idea, see cairo for explaination - thus it would be nice if there was a little text entry for each flag used in the ebuild. It's a lot of work but it helps determine what we need to compile with.. at least I hope so.

Another thing that might work out well would be use flag dependency, I've seen an issue where a package will require another package to be compiled with a certain flag to compile under certain settings - these errors arren't currently caught by portage.

third suggestion would be shipping profiles like "GNOME desktop" which would set your use flags and packages required to get a GNOME desktop running. Just running emerge gnome wouldn't work here because we are bound to get a lot of stuff installed we don't need because of the default use flags.

And finally whatever happened to the gpg check in portage, as far as I can tell we are still open to man in the middle attacks during sync

nlindblad · Post by **nlindblad** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 3:02 pm

chrisaw wrote:See that's fair enough but it doesn't seem quite right posting feature requests in a bugs section =S Just something off putting about it. Maybe that's just me :S But it would be nice to be able to just see feature requests and not have to sift through bugs too

Since bugzilla is the home of the developers it's far more proper to add feature requests there and not force them to go through hundreds and hundreds of forum threads...

Sir No · Post by **Sir No** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 9:13 pm

LucaSpiller wrote:* Release dates in ebuilds

At the moment Portage checks for updates by checking the version numbers in the name. Having a field containing the release data would be good as it would prevent the issues with WINE that have been experienced (CVS releases thought to be newer than 0.9).

As for fixing the Wine thing... Do it yourself!

Look:

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# emerge -pv wine

These are the packages that I would merge, in order:

Calculating dependencies ...done!
[ebuild     U ] app-emulation/wine-20050930 [0.9.1] +X +alsa +arts +cups -debug +esd +gif +glut -jack +jpeg +lcms +ldap -nas +ncurses +opengl +oss -scanner +truetype +xml2 0 kB

Total size of downloads: 0 kB

This is obviously not too good. The 20050930 version from CVS is considered newer than 0.9.1.

And now:

Code: Select all

# echo ">=app-emulation/wine-2000" >> /etc/portage/package.mask
# emerge -pv wine

These are the packages that I would merge, in order:

Calculating dependencies ...done!
[ebuild     U ] app-emulation/wine-0.9.2 [0.9.1] +X +alsa +arts +cups -debug +esd +gif +glut -jack +jpeg +lcms +ldap -nas +ncurses +opengl +oss -scanner +truetype +xml2 10,059 kB

Total size of downloads: 10,059 kB

That's much better, isn't it? You already have the tools at your disposal. Just learn how to use them.

Eventually the old, CVS Wine versions will be removed from portage, so this will become a non-issue. Right now just mask the old ebuilds an you will be fine.

Friendly,

Post by **pjp** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 9:27 pm

A better thread would be "Gentoo 2006.0 Feature Request IMPLEMENTORS"

Genone · Post by **Genone** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 9:51 pm

Lets see, lots of old stuff here:
- portage GUI: use porthole (or any other from app-portage), we won't waste time with it
- ebuild release dates: no (concept doesn't work, also too much maintenance)
- ebuild writer var: use the Changelog
- per-package use flag descriptions: on the todo list
- use-deps: on the todo list
- gpg checks: signing has to be nailed down first, council is working on it
- more profiles: no clue
- ndiswrapper: no clue
- gui ebuild creator. see app-portage/abeni

playfool · Post by **playfool** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 10:10 pm

wow.. it appears I have minions doing my biddings.. cool

chrisaw · Post by **chrisaw** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 11:32 pm

lol, i like it

Ya wont waste time with a package manager but ya willing to "waste it" on a GUI installer for an OS that upon completion has... no GUI!

lol. Sorry guys, makes no sense to me

By the way, not trying to have a digg at the coders here, gotta say... great work guys!

Shadow Skill · Post by **Shadow Skill** » Fri Nov 25, 2005 11:41 pm

I don't see whats so bad about having an ncurses frontend be standard, I mean its not unheard of for tools that function simillarly to Portage to have them.[Sorcery] I also do not see how its a waste of time to include features that make the tools easier to use. Presenting people with a built in frontend for something like Portage is a good thing period, leaving everything up to third parties doesn't always produce very desirable results. Personally I don't like Porthole and I would love to have an ncurses frontend built in that I could use if I get tired of typing in the CLI commands to do various things to Portage. Its something that Sorcery allows and its something I really miss in Gentoo, Sorcery even has facilities for letting people choose precompiled kernels that they offer. If memory serves me you can freely elect to do the kernel build yourself from within the Sorcery interface but I am not entirely sure if this is possible as it has been quite some time since I used Sourcemage and I didn't have it installed all that long. Maybe someone else who has used Sorcemage can confirm this?

omp · Post by **omp** » Sat Nov 26, 2005 12:28 am

chrisaw wrote:lol, i like it Ya wont waste time with a package manager but ya willing to "waste it" on a GUI installer for an OS that upon completion has... no GUI! lol. Sorry guys, makes no sense to me

What's not making sense is your sentence.

Can you please rephrase it because I have no idea what you are saying.