Porting Portage to different OSes

[adammorley]

Has there been any talk of porting portage to other OSes? I've been thinking about it --- maintaining software on solaris can be a PITA at times --- any thoughts? How difficult would it be? I would think it'd be rather easy. . . . ..

[jtr]

I have some experience with this. Originally I started out with MacOS X, but wanted some open source software packages. I tried Fink, which made my system unbootable. After an OS reinstall, I looked for other options. Gentoo's portage looked like the best bet. I examined the source code and decided that I would be better off trying to write my own "User Mode" portage for OS X; I would make it install everything under $HOME/.portage, from binaries to libraries, so that my OS wouldn't be hosed if anything went wrong.

Writing a User Mode portage-like system was surprisingly easy. The hard part is getting the packages to build under OS X. It would probably be much easier to work with Solaris.

Unfortunately I lost the source code in my transition to Gentoo, but it would be fairly simple to resurrect a User Mode portage project. My opinion is that it's much easier to write a system "in the spirit of portage" and then converge it with portage, than to try making a Grand Unified Portage from step one. But that is only my opinion- I'm not really familiar with the portage system and free software build processes in general.

BTW, while I was looking for alternatives to Fink, I found several projects in various stages of vaporware/development which promise to provide a cross-platform build system. One that I recall is A-A-P (www.a-a-p.org), from the author of vim.