Some suggestions: 1. emerge is missing one key function -- I say key, because we can't consider deploying Gentoo as the OS of choice for x86 servers unless it has this feature: the ability to see what ebuilds were installed on the system and what version they are.
Package management is extremely important to us in the server arena because it represents the bulk of our long-term maintenance for both by hand and with our extensive automated tools which figures out what stuff to install based on what currently is installed. Currently, the argument is to use Debian instead of Gentoo because of missing bits related to package management such as this. I suck at coding or I'd contribute something, but I could take a shot at it. Perhaps consider a command such as 'emerge info' to list one-liners listing all installed ebuilds and their versions? And 'emerge info <specific ebuild>' to view info for a specific ebuild. And some sort of wildcard support such as 'emerge info foo*' to return info about all installed ebuilds matching the wildcard pattern. For the most part, I think you've already got code in emerge to figure out what ebuilds are installed and at what version... could adapt it to also be used for an 'emerge info' function. 2. The only other thing we're missing with Gentoo is a network boot/install server -- we already have AIX's NIM, Solaris's Jumpstart, RedHat's KickStart. Even Windows and MacOS has something. :) With the number of sites and servers we run, this is a crucial bit of functionality. Since that functionality is generally generic -- support tftp, etc. ...it sounds theoretically simple to support this one way or another. I wonder if RedHat's KickStart stuff could be ported to Gentoo? I hesitate to suggest this, but I'm also hesitant to suggest something that would chew up developers' time by doing something from scratch. Gentoo's got a firm hold on the desktop... and getting there with the hardened project for the high security stuff... but could get a bigger chunk of the servers. -Dan -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
