Seemant suggested I file this report. I inquired about the possibility of having the env.d environment builder allow users to specify which packages they add to their environment. Ideally, there would be a way for the admin to lock certain packages into everyone's path, but that is secondary. A simple example of this would be to allow a user to decide if they want some package in /opt in their environment, such as opera or netscape. One approach to this that seems to at least be somewhat congruent with gentoo is modules, which can be found at http://modules.sourceforge.net. I would include an ebuild if I were sure I could write one that would work. One drawback to this system is that it is tcl based, but it is more of a demonstration of a concept than something calling for a direct port. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3. Please contact me if there is anything else I can do to assist with this RFE. I am not a coder, but I am a moderately experienced sysadmin who is willing to do what I can to help.
This is portage domain ... although I do not fully understand the issue ?
My apologizes for not getting back to anyone sooner. What I was suggesting is modifying the way that the files in env.d are parsed so that admins or users can specify which ones get includeded into the environment. Some of this functionality in theory exists in the java-config tool. The core functionality I am suggesting would be: 1) root can specify which of the files in /etc/env.d MUST be included for all users. 2) root can restrict certain files in /etc/env.d to certain users or groups 3) a user can select which version of a package is added if there are multiple versions (i.e. the java virtual packages or different runtime libraries) 4) a user can decide to include the environment for ebuilds and applications living in /opt or not include them on their own. For example, including netscape in one's path or not. This idea has come about as part of an attempt to build a compute server that will service many different application areas. While it has been manageable to install each package into it's own bit of /opt, I am trying to come up with a method like modules within the gentoo idiom that would allow a mechanical engineer to have abaqus and ansys in their environment without having gaussian or sas in there as well. I added a pointer to modules just as a suggestion of how this has been approached from a generic unix viewpoint in the past. I suspect that this ended up in portage because env-update is part of the portage ebuild. Thanks, Andy
Created attachment 54269 [details] ebuild for modules This is an ebuild that a contractor wrote for me here to allow modules to be installed under Gentoo. It includes some localisms, but it will let people see what modules does and the functionality that I think would be good to have. Andy
Putting a hold on feature requests for portage as they are drowning out the bugs. Most of these features should be available in the next major version of portage. But for the time being, they are just drowning out the major bugs and delaying the next version's progress. Any bugs that contain patches and any bugs for etc-update or dispatch-conf can be reopened. Sorry, I'm just not good enough with bugzilla. ;)
Reopening for consideration.
I don't think anybody is interested in working on this, reopen if you can provide a patch that implements what you're after.
