Gentoo Linux Portage Development

1.  Project Description

The Portage Development Project works to provide a continuously expanding and developing tool for the management and installation of packages. The developers work on providing a coherent system that is as trouble free as possible (backwards compatible, automated, and simple). Bugs are tracked and fixed from the Gentoo bug tracker and developer-developer correspondence is maintained on the gentoo-portage-dev mailing list. Another communication channel is the #gentoo-portage IRC channel on the freenode network.

2.  Project Goals

The goal of the Portage Development Project stands at providing a seamless integration of developer and user tools to aid the growth and maintenance of the Gentoo Portage Tree.

3.  Developers

All developers can be reached by e-mail using nickname@gentoo.org.

4.  Recruitment

We are currently looking for users interested in helping the project with the following jobs:

Documentation writer

Job description

Updating our manpages, writing new information in docbook, eventually adding docstings to our python API

Requirements

Basic skills with groff and docbook-xml

Contact

Marius Mauch

Repoman maintainer

Job description

Maintaining, or better rewriting our repoman QA tool used by ebuild devs for ebuild maintenance

Requirements

Good python skills, familiar with bash and ebuilds, able to work with a messy codebase

Contacts

Zac Medico, Marius Mauch

5.  Contributing to Portage

Bug Reports

Please report all bugs you encounter on our bug tracking system. Before opening a new bug report please make sure that the bug has not already been reported by another user.

In your bug report please state clearly:

• How you triggered the bug (commands executed, files edited, ...)
• What portage version you used when you found the bug
• If the bug is reproducable
• The output of the emerge --info command

Please don't get too impatient if there is no immideate reaction on your bug, it can sometimes take a while before a developer has time to look at it (this also applies to non-Portage bug reports). Often we'll need additional information from you while trying to resolve a bug, please provide it as soon as you can, if we have to wait too long (over a month) we'll likely close the bug as RESOLVED:NEEDINFO, you can however reopen it when you posted the requested information.

Please do not reopen bugs unless you're in one of the following situations:

• The bug was marked as RESOLVED:FIXED, but you can still reproduce it with the new version that is suposed to contain the fix (the version is generally stated when the bug is closed)
• The bug was marked as RESOLVED:NEEDINFO and you have provided the requested information
• The bug was marked as RESOLVED:WONTFIX, RESOLVED:CANTFIX or RESOLVED:LATER and you think we misunderstood you. Do not reopen a bug just because you disagree with our resolution.

Be aware that we will still read comments on bug reports even if the report itself is closed, so you don't have to reopen it just to get our attention.

Every bug report deals with one specific problem, please respect that and don't talk about other not directly related bugs on a bug report.

Testing multiple Portage versions

There are various reasons why you'd want to have multiple versions of portage available at the same time without having to install them as system default. Examples would be to check which versions are affected by a specific bug, to test new features before deploying a new version or have a svn checkout available for testing while keeping a stable release for normal operation.

As of Portage-2.1.2 one can have and use an arbitrary number of Portage installations parallel to each other by adjusting the two environment variables PATH and PYTHONPATH. For example if you have a checkout of the trunk branch at /checkouts/portage/trunk you'd set them like this:

export PYTHONPATH="/checkouts/portage/trunk/pym:${PYTHONPATH}"
export PATH="/checkouts/portage/trunk/bin:${PATH}"

With those settings calling tools like emerge, repoman or ebuild will pickup the correct locations to import libraries. External tools like gentoolkit or porthole may or may not respect those settings though. Setting PATH isn't even necessary if you always call the commands by their full name (e.g. /checkouts/portage/trunk/bin/emerge instead of emerge).

Submitting Patches

If you want to submit a patch to sys-apps/portage or a related package, please make sure the patch follows these criteria:

• Use TABS. Some people like 8 spaces, some people like 4, and some like 2. Tabs are the happy medium. Patches that use spaces and/or a mix of tabs and spaces for indentation will likely be rejected.
• Generally submit diff files instead of whole files, only when the diff is significantly larger than the file itself or the file didn't exist previously submitting the whole file is acceptable.
• Diffs have to be in unified form (diff -u, svn diff).
• Always submit a detailed explanation of what the patch does and, if necessary, why you chose the specific implementation you submitted (IOW: what's the benefit of the patch). Also include any problems and/or drawbacks you think the patch has.
• Always state against which version (for releases) or revision and branch (for svn patches) the patch was made.
• Only submit clean patches. Do not include other patches in a submitted patch. If the code found in a patch does not match the description of the patch, it will be rejected. Also don't add any unrelated code cleanups in your patch
• Python docstrings should conform to the Portage Docstring Specification.

If the patch is related to a specific bug report, please attach it there as text/plain. If it is not directly related to a bug report (to your knowledge) please send it to the gentoo-portage-dev mailing list and tag the subject with '[PATCH]'.

Access to Portage SVN repositories

The Portage sourcecode is maintained within a SVN repository on the Gentoo SVN server. This server is only accessible for Gentoo developers, it doesn't offer anonymous access. If you are a dev: The main repository is located at svn+ssh://cvs.gentoo.org/var/svnroot/portage/main, please note that it is subject to strict access controls, only people listed in the developers section on this page are able to commit to it.

The repository currently contains the following branches (incomplete list):

• trunk: the current main development line
• branches/2.1-experimental: the former development line, now abandoned (don't use it unless you want to backport stuff)
• branches/prefix: experimental branch with support for prefix installs
• branches/2.0.54: old stable maintenance branch, nothing happens here anymore
• branches/2.1.2: current stable maintenance branch

6.  Subprojects

The Portage project has the following subprojects:

7.  Resources

Resources offered by the Portage project are:

• Portage Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
• List of common major portage problems and solutions
• Guide for manually fixing a broken portage install
• Some notes about how to obtain and test development versions
• Membership policies of the Portage project
• Portage NEWS file listing new features
• Portage RELEASE-NOTES file listing upgrade information
• #gentoo-portage IRC channel
• gentoo-portage-dev mailing list
• sys-apps/portage package
• Portage SVN repository (over viewcvs)
• Open bugs assigned to the dev-portage alias
• Open bugs assigned to the pms-bugs alias
• Open bugs assigned to the tools-portage alias

8.  External Documentation Resources

Unless otherwise noted the following resources are maintained by the documentation project, but as they are the primary online documentation for portage we will list them here.

• A Portage Introduction
• Portage Features
• Working with Portage
• USE flags
• Gentoo Developer Handbook (maintained by the 'Developer relations' project)
• Gentoo Devmanual (maintained the 'QA' project)

9.  Project tasks