Hi,
I maintain an internal overlay directory for my users that gives
them some slightly modified packages, and meta-packages to help keep
them all up-to-date. Every so often I've produced an ebuild and put it
in a category that I though appropriate and later an official gentoo
version is released that's in a different directory. I'd quite like
them to automatically update to it, so I started looking into how
portage performs package moves...
It appears that portage has a list of files under
/usr/portage/profiles/updates/ that contain all the package renames, etc
that have happened at any particular time. I haven't managed to find
much documentation on this however (probably since it's only really used
by the main portage maintainers). However, I tried creating one within
my overlay. I had a test user attempt to gensync with the overlay and
then see if it would notice the update. Apparently it didn't, even
after trying a full emerge --sync.
So my questions are, is there any documentation I could look at for
portage's movement mechanism that isn't just the source code (I managed
to trace it back to a few update_ents functions in portage.py, but
couldn't make much of them since I haven't studied the internals of
portage much)? Is it possible to provide movement directives in an
overlay, or is that only applicable to the main tree? If so where would
I find out how to do it? If not, what is the suggested mechanism for
carrying this out (the best I can come up with is having the renamed
package block the original, but this requires all the users to unmerge a
package before the update will take)? Also if not is this functionality
ever going to be added? I realise that portage was never designed to
handle multiple trees, and that the overlays are just a small added
extra, but I thought it might still be possible to add this feature. If
anyone has any other ideas or suggestions I'd be most greatful. Thanks
very much for your time...
Mike 5:)
(Also I apologize if this is a repost, I didn't receive it back, so I'm
assuming the first version never made it to the list.)
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