[chef] Re: Re: [RFC] CHEF-50 - Portage use flags & keywords

[Kenneth Kalmer < >]

On Mon, Feb 8, 2010 at 10:56 PM, Adam Jacob 
<
 >
 wrote:
>
> I would prefer not to have the generic terms "use" and "keywords" be
> tied to this.  It seems like this is indeed package-level options,
> that just happen to set some things in the filesystem for you prior to
> packaging.

I agreed, I mentioned it in the original message so we have something
'bad' to improve upon.

> My gut says the thing to do is to have a re-usable generic for hints
> of this kind to the underlying package providers.  One of the prime
> reasons people choose one system over another are exactly this kind of
> implementation detail - you pick Gentoo partly because you love the
> use and keywords systems.  Something like:
>
> package "dev-db/couchdb" do
>  hints :keywords => { :accept => "~x86" }
> end
>
> Might work, and the underlying package provider can choose to do with
> it as it will.

This is a great suggestion and makes a lot of sense.

> Another option would be to make these attributes available only
> through the specific resource for the provider:
>
> portage_package "dev-db/couchdb" do
>  keywords :accept => "~x86"
>  use :flags => "mysql"
> end
>
> You could build the nicer version (with the keywords and use
> attributes) as sugar on top of the generic hints attribute.

This can also work quite nicely.

The guys in #chef were also alive with suggestions, and I've updated
the ticket with links to a gist and the beginnings of a
gentoo-cookbooks repo [1]. Gábor Vészi had some tremendous insights
into how to configure portage properly on a package by package basis,
which allows a simple definition around template resource. At first it
sounded too much to have two/three blocks for emerging packages
(use/keyworks/package), but we quickly agreed that in case of manual
intervention by a system administrator the generated configs would
work great to keep things sane.

For the gentoo specifics like use flags and keywords, the
gentoo-cookbooks' portage recipe seems to have it well covered (I'm
still testing everything). But I can imagine edge cases where a
'hints' implementation would be really useful.

Thanks for the lively discussion around this and other gentoo issues.
I really need to create a wiki page and start consolidating this
information in there.

Best

[1] http://github.com/veszig/gentoo-cookbooks


--
Kenneth Kalmer

 
http://opensourcery.co.za
@kennethkalmer