On Sat, 22 Jul 2006 18:04:10 +0200 "Kevin F. Quinn" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: | If it were to be implemented with symlinks (implying one entry is | "real" and the others are aliases) the package manager just needs to | canonicalise any symlinked CPs it comes across.
Not that simple. Think about installed packages, overlays and changing aliases. The package manager would need to keep track of what aliases were at any given time. Then there're symlinks to outside the tree and circular symlinks... There's a lot more too it than is initially obvious. | Since we can't have symlinks in CVS, there are other ways it can be | done; first thing that pops into my head is an "alias" package entry | in the tree, where instead of ebuilds & files/ etc it would just | contain a file "alias" with the category (and perhaps package name) | of the aliased package. Files are cleaner than symlinks for other reasons too. Also allows the opportunity of making 'deprecated' aliases that issue QA warnings. | > Has to walk the entire tree... so if N category per pkg is going to | > be proposed, need to preserve the fast lookup that's there now. | | I don't think the above ideas cause any substantial change to the | amount of processing required. Perhaps you should think. It's nowhere near as straight forward as you claim. Which is not to say it's not doable, just that it's not doable cheaply... -- Ciaran McCreesh Mail : ciaran dot mccreesh at blueyonder.co.uk -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
