Porteus, Sounds great, suggestion

> <snip, Jon Nall working hard on Porteus>, but even
> then, there exist fundamental reasons to rewrite
> the system from the ground up.  This rewrite will
> be done using C/C++, and it will aim to be the best
> specified and designed package manager ever - all
> before a single line of its code is ever written.
> Porteus will help guide our way.

I *applaud* this direction.  Great work.  I don't 
think *anything* is lost with this direction, and we
can gain *a lot*.

FWIW, C++ and Python work *great* together.  We do
all our 'core' stuff in C++, and then create test
harnesses for component testing and systems testing
with Python (Python<==>C++ bindings are trivially
simple with the C++ Boost library).  So, do the API
the way you want in C++, and we can have the full
Python API in a matter of hours.

I don't know if this is the right time, but I have a
couple suggestions that may be nice for the new
build/distro system:

* Ability to define a 'que' or 'bundle' of a set of
packages so we don't have to wait for one 'emerge'
to complete before starting the next.

* Peer2Peer, a local script, or some way to
'distribute' binaries.  In other words, if I have
five identical machines, one machine should do the
optimized build and then propagate the binaries to
the other four machines (no need for additional
build operations on the other machines, since they 
have identical hardware, and that should relieve some
load from the distro server).  This is necessary for
schools (25 machines in a classroom), and many
businesses, and maybe embedded.

* Better search support for packages, and maybe some
'header' block or better description of the contents
in a package.   It's a minor issue, but it would
be nice if 'emerge --search something' gave me a
good 'header description' of what the package 
provides (text prose).  And, things like the Gentoo
package distribution web site is fine if you already
know what package you want, but it's not very easy to
browse.

Just some thoughts.

--charley
[email protected]


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