As packages get moved around to make the portage tree more manageable, it would be nice to have a file that lists the mappings that portage will follow. Below is a transcript of the discussion on irc. Quick note: At the moment we have at least one package name, aterm, that shows up twice in portage (and, in fact, is two entirely different programs). Karltk is utterly opposed to requiring unique package names in portage, but I'm not sure of his reasons. Keying on the package name would require that we enforce package name uniqueness, of course. 12:25 <@g2boojum> seemant: It occurs to me that moving packages around would be less painful for users if portage supported it. In some sense we already do w/ the virtuals file, since it can map olddir/pkg to newdir/pkg, but it would be nice to have a separate file for devs to change so that virtuals doesn't get overly cluttered. Does that make sense? 12:25 <@drobbins> g2boojum: newer versions of portage can depend on a package without a category name 12:26 <@drobbins> g2boojum: at least in theory :) 12:26 <@danarmak> g2boojum: absolute sense, a "remapping" file could be in order - at least to update var/db/pkg 12:26 <@drobbins> g2boojum: I thought that this would be the easiest way to get things moved around. 12:26 <@danarmak> g2boojum: i wanted something like that back in the big kde/gnome move when we destroyed kde-apps :-) 12:26 <@seemant> g2boojum: yes, that makes perfect sense! 12:27 <@g2boojum> drobbins: Okay. Does "emerge -u world" still rely on the category? 12:27 <@drobbins> g2boojum: yes it does, so it's only an incomplete solution. 12:28 <@g2boojum> drobbins: That's the "breakage" I think it would be nice to prevent, since that's what seems to annoy the users most. Two months later they realize that they haven't been updating something. . .. 12:31 <@drobbins> g2boojum: I have not figured out a specific solution to making package moving easy. 12:31 <@drobbins> g2boojum: it is not as simple as it looks. 12:32 <@drobbins> g2boojum: I think the way we'll need to approach it is to have the ability to "unify" two different cat/pkgs into one. 12:32 <@drobbins> g2boojum: so internally, they are considered identical. 12:33 <@drobbins> g2boojum: it has the potential to slow things down, though.
Portage 2.0.26 supports global update to move packages in the user's db.
