Having used Gentoo for a few years now, one thing that has been annoying to me is the tremendous duplication of effort and uphill battle of creating ebuilds (build recipes) for language-specific packages that already have their own build systems.
For example, many languages such as Python (pip), Node (npm), Ruby (gems), TeXLive (tlmgr), Haskell (cabal), Rust (cargo) have ways of redistributing up-to-date dependencies and ensuring that they build properly in most environments. Portage, it seems, does not take advantage of this at all. If I want to install the package 'foo', which has 'bar' as a dependency (which has been installed through cabal, for instance). Why should portage download some outdated second copy of the sources for 'bar', rebuild it, and scatter it around the file system where it cannot be used by other programs installed by cabal? It seems reasonable to me to 'hook' portage into these other package managers, so that running 'emerge bar' would actually run 'cabal install bar' rather than downloading sources and running 'ghc'. This would make managing dependencies much easier as versions change, since most (all?) these alternate package managers have ways of specifying specific versions of packages or pinning. It would also put an end to the breakage caused by, for example, running 'pip' as root and breaking all the python libraries portage has pulled in. I also notice that there is a GSoC 2018 project for integrating Rust more closely within Gentoo. It seems to me that allowing ebuilds to be written like this would help resolve this not only for Rust, but for all languages with similar build systems (which is most modern languages, frankly). The only real issue I see with this is the potential loss of granularity with USE flags for some of these packages, but having poked around the sort of language-specific libraries and bindings available, hardly any have any USE flags available, and those that do only offer debug symbols or documentation, which many of these other build systems offer as well, so I doubt this would be an issue for anyone. I could of course be wrong. Is this a feature/improvement other Gentoo users/developers would be interested in? If so, I would love to help discuss and potentially help with its implementation.
