User Emerges

korngerd · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 12 Mar 2004 Posts: 104

I'm not sure if I'm posting to the right forum, or if this suggestion has been made before (I think I searched the forums relatively carefully, though), or if such feature is already in portage (I don't think so...). I have a certain suggestion to improve Gentoo, though. Just as we all have system-wide emerges, I thought that certain ebuilds should optionally have user-based emerges. For example, let's say a user wants a certain BMP plugin (say media-plugins/bmp-rootvis). The user would have to ask the sys-admin (or whoever has emerge priveleges) to emerge the plugin. Instead, if the user could emerge bmp-rootvis on his/her own into his/her own ~/.bmp/Plugins/ directory, he/she wouldn't have to ask the admin to emerge it separately, waste the admin's time doing so, or have to give up the plugin due to the sys-admin's lack of interest in the plugin (of course, the user can just ./configure && make the plugin him/herself, but I don't think that would be the "Gentoo-way" of doing things). This MAY imply that only certain ebuilds allow this (I don't really know what kind of security implications would exist if the user tried to emerge a whole system into his/her own directory, thus chrooting a new environment). Would this be even viable (security implications, libtool problems, etc.), or is this just a plain stupid idea (in which case that would just re-affirm that I'm still a computer illiterate person

). Also, if the mods think that this topic should be in another forum, please do move me around (and sorry for posting to the wrong forum)

i92guboj · Posted: Sun May 01, 2005 4:19 pm Post subject:

Your idea seems great to me. But I think that that is not a so easy task.

Of course, as you said, that would only viable for certain kind of apps, not all. To make portage aware of that thing is, maybe, the easiest thing here (correct me somebody if I'm wrong). I know almost nothing about portage and libtool, so I can really talk with suppositions. That could be something like 'don't let normal users emerge things in the system group, but only in world', so that's not really the problem. The problem is (of couse in my opinion) that most apps would need some tweaking to run properly if installed into any other dir, so, I would make necesary not only to change portage, but also all the single packages. That's not impossible, but is a hard thing to do. :cry:

curtis119 · Posted: Sun May 01, 2005 4:59 pm Post subject:

Moved from Portage & Programming. Suggestions about improving gentoo go here in chat.
_________________
Gentoo: it's like wiping your ass with silk.

korngerd · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 12 Mar 2004 Posts: 104

ecoffey · Posted: Mon May 02, 2005 9:22 pm Post subject:

You MIGHT be able to pull something like that for yourself. If you just make your own customized ebuild and then use the ebuild command instead of emerge to step through all the steps maybe. It would be pretty cool, but I don't think the portage code base is quite _that_ abstract for it :-)

Genone · Posted: Mon May 02, 2005 10:10 pm Post subject:

maybe for 4.0 or so.

korngerd · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 12 Mar 2004 Posts: 104