Bug 15268 – Allow interactive hooks into ebuilds

• Product: Portage Development
• Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

[Description Shevek 2003-02-07 08:27:45 UTC]

Debugging ebuilds is very difficult, particularly when there is a task which
cannot be scripted (e.g. editing the perl config.sh to make SIGTRTMIN=32 rather
than -1).

It would be a great advantage if ebuilds had a hook system where they could
invoke an interactive subshell in a build directory at various points in the
ebuild. This would include standard hooks, such as "pre-configure",
"post-configure", etc. ebuild scripts would then contain lines such as

call-hook preconfigure

which by default would do nothing, but there would be a variable

BUILDHOOKS="preconfigure postconfigure preinstall"

which would cause those particular hooks to invoke a subshell. Particular
ebuilds would implement more hooks than just the standard set, but a standard
set would be a good starting point.

If the subshell exits with 0, the ebuild would continue as normal. If it exited
with a nonzero status, the ebuild would abort. The prompt (PS1) in a subshell
would be set to indicate the hook for which the subshell was invoked.

This would facilitate:
Patching source on the fly.
Running extra tests and debugging tests.
Modifying the Makefile before build.

It would not affect the current ebuild system at all. If no hooks are specified,
the ebuild would proceed precisely as it does currently.

Currently, I'm discovering that many of my problems are due to gcc miscompiling
lots of things when CFLAGS="-march=pentium3 -mcpu=pentium3 -O3" and I want to
run valgrind on lots of things halfway through the install.

[Comment 1 Nicholas Jones (RETIRED) 2003-02-21 05:29:00 UTC]

-march=pentium3 implies -mcpu=pentium3

[Comment 2 SpanKY 2003-02-25 15:21:40 UTC]

why not put a 'bash' line right into the middle of the ebuild