I wrote up a tiny thing about moving Portage to a more Debian-like structure, where you download package lists and go from there. With portage, I think it would be useful to have a /usr/portage/categories/cat-egory.list{,.gz,.bz2} to sync rather than /usr/portage/can-egory/ to sync. Many fewer files, but the file in question would be much larger. The file would contain the name of each package; the versions available; the size of downloads for each version; the short description; the USE flags that affect the package; the package's homepage; the hash of each ebuild; the DEPENDS and RDPENDS for each ebuild; the KEYWORDS for each ebuild; and any other immediately relavent data for dependency calculation. It would also contain where to download ebuilds from (for third party support). The process would then become a matter of: - Calculating dependencies - Downloading the ebuild - Checking the md5sum of the ebuild - Downloading the related files as dictated by the ebuild itself (SRC_URI as well as patches, manifest, changelog, and digests) - Executing the ebuild as normal I'll post the short proposal as an attachment.
Created attachment 36779 [details] Small proposal Very sketchy, leaves you lots of leeway.
Please take this to the gentoo-dev mailing list, and propose it there... Offhand, I'm pretty strongly against this- this would not be much fun dialup user imo. Closing as CANTFIX; take it to the dev mailing list to get feedback... if this did actually go ahead, it would likely be a glep; if that occurs, we reopen this bug for the feature implementation. We wouldn't be able to make a massive change to the tree like that w/out the majority of devs agreeing- if they like the proposal, and things are signed off on, then we can look into how to actually implement it.
