Re: [ITP] Gentoo Portage 2.0.54

["Jason Alonso" <jbalonso at gmail dot com>]

Aye...

I thought I forgot something.  :-)

The minor part that I forgot is a URL to the major-distro that
describes the package. 
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-x86.xml?part=2&chap=1

The slightly more major part is the one-liner description:  Portage is
the primary package management system for Gentoo Linux.  Most notably,
it is a package management system that compiles every package from
source (with exceptions) with installation-specific options as
desired, and it seems to have regression testing facilities.  It can
also cache its binary builds in tarballs for other, similar Portage
installations to use in an automated manner.

Now for the "why?" discussion...

Do I see this as a primary means of distributing Cygwin installations?
 No.  There are some who would disagree with that, but it's an
implementation mess I'd rather not think about.

I see this has an excellent opportunity to simplify the maintenance of
binary packages for Cygwin setup, especially when porting new packages
that build OOTB.  Touch-up your ebuild, run portage, test it, and then
run quickpkg (or a variant) to build the package for Cygwin setup.

I am going to be using this for my own work because I work in a
research environment with Linux,  Windows, and Mac OS X all over the
place, where we develop layers upon layers of in-house software that
changes frequently enough that everything needs to be recompiled from
source.  I also have to do machine-specific package management for
more machines than I can be in front of all the time (some of them I
don't see for weeks at a time), but remote administration of Cygwin
package installation (with dependency tracking) is not scaleable with
Cygwin setup.  Portage can solve all of these problems for me, but it
seems kinda lame for me to keep the implications to myself.

Regards,
Jason

On 2/28/06, Christopher Faylor <cgf-no-personal-reply-please@cygwin.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 28, 2006 at 08:49:16PM -0500, Jason Alonso wrote:
> >I've been around since the days of B18, but I've been a quiet one...
> >
> >I have ported portage to Cygwin.  There are still a lot of rough edges
> >(and a lot of work to do on the ebuild front), but essential
> >emerge/unmerge/ebuild/quickpkg functionality is operational.  The
> >system succeeds in building "patch", patching itself, and installing.
> >To make that clear: portage builds patch, patches portage, and
> >installs portage.
> >
> >Downloads, docs (*cough* [no really, I coughed]... a couple READMEs),
> >overlays, and a setup.hint are available here:
> >
> >http://web.mit.edu/~jalonso/www/cygwin-portage/
>
> This isn't really an ITP since it doesn't follow the guidelines.
>
> How about starting by telling us what portage is and why it would be
> useful for Cygwin?
>
> I actually use gentoo here and know what portage is but I think it would
> make sense for you to explain why this would be useful.  Personally, I'm
> not really sure that this is a direction that we want to go but maybe I'm
> missing something.
>
> cgf
>