Bug 89052 – Meta packages usermanagement feature with portage

• Product: Portage Development
• Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE

[Description yoyo 2005-04-14 02:24:46 UTC]

Firts, this is not a duplicate of bug 84617. ;-)

Well this idea starts from the split of kde-meta package.
I agree with it but in any case my opinion wasn't opinion of rest of the world ;-). But spirit of Gentoo is to gives users the possibility to manage their system from A to Z. And that's why I submit this idea.

As we can manage specific useflags, masking or keywords, I think we can manage meta-package. For example by creating an "/etc/portage/user-meta" (or maybe "/usr/local/portage/user-meta" would be more appropriate) directory where we can create our meta-package files. In each files on it (named as we want) we add packages we want to see as part of meta-package.
An example to explain : I buy a printer; I create a "/usr/local/portage/user-meta/printing" file where I put : 
net-print/cups
net-print/cups-pdf
net-print/gnome-cups-manager
media-gfx/gimp-print
net-print/hpijs

Then "emerge user-meta/printing" will install all packages listed in this file (and put them on "/var/lib/portage/world" for normal managements of dependencies and upgrades).

Advantage is that we can choose meta-package, with all this imply : unmerging meta-packages will really clean our system (with clean "world" file); adding/removing file to meta-package or meta-package file is easy (wanna try fluxbox, ok I add it on my "/usr/local/portage/user-meta/my-wm" et voila ...).

I don't know if it's kind of feature is hard to add but there's no need to add useflag or portage option or anything else ... Just "emerge `cat /usr/local/portage/user-meta/printing`" for installing meta-package, "emerge -C blabla" to uninstall etc.

Real problem is if I delete a "user-meta" file without unmerging it, every package stay on the "world" file. So a list of all meta-file has to be stored (with its contents) when emerging it (for example in "/var/lib/portage/meta") and when "depcleaning" system a comparison between this file and files in user-meta directory as to be done to unmerge non-needed packages.

So, that's it.
Sorry for this so loooong post and for my poor english.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:

[Comment 1 Jason Stubbs (RETIRED) 2005-04-14 02:28:14 UTC]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 6411 ***

[Comment 2 yoyo 2005-04-14 02:54:11 UTC]

Sorry for duplicate bug report ...
I didn't find the 6411 bug which is quite the same as mine.
But in any case, this idea is "on air".  ;)