Difference between revisions of "Portage Dynamic Slot"

Revision as of 00:42, 27 September 2011

Portage-2.3.1 in the experimental tree contains support for dynamic slots.

Traditional SLOT

Historically, Portage has supported SLOTs, which are defined statically in the ebuild and allow certain package versions to be installed alongside other versions of the same package. For example, libpng-1.4.2 could have a SLOT of "1.4" while libpng-1.5 could have a SLOT of "1.5". This indicates that these ebuilds can be installed alongside each other.

It has been the policy of Gentoo Linux to only allow SLOT to be set statically in the ebuild, and not vary (via code) within the ebuild.

Dynamic SLOT

Funtoo dynamic slot functionality changes this policy and allows SLOT to vary. This is useful for custom builds of an application whose paths are defined by an external variable passed in to Portage.

Here is an example of how dynamic slot works in an ebuild, and shows how it is intended to be used -- to allow custom versions of ebuilds to be built alongside non-custom versions:

SLOT="$PV"
IUSE="custom"

pkg_setup() {
    if has "${EBUILD_PHASE:none}" "unpack" "prepare" "compile" "install"; then
        if [ -n "$CUSTOM_CONFIG" ]; then
            SLOT="$PV-$(dirname $CUSTOM_CONFIG)"
        else
            die "Please define CUSTOM_CONFIG to use 'custom' USE variable"
        fi
    fi
}

src_compile() {
    econf --prefix=/usr/$SLOT --special_options=$CUSTOM_CONFIG || die
    emake || die
}

src_install() {
    emake install DESTDIR="$D" || die
    insinto /usr/$SLOT
    doins foo
}

Above, the same ebuild has a USE flag called "custom". When it is set, the ebuild looks for a variable called CUSTOM_CONFIG in the environment (this would typically be exported into the current shell.) The name of the CUSTOM_CONFIG file is used to modify SLOT, so that if CUSTOM_CONFIG pointed to /foo/bar/oni, and the ebuild version was 1.0-r1, then SLOT would be set to 1.0-oni.

Also note that this ebuild takes care to ensure that the ebuild modifies all paths so that the files in this ebuild will not conflict with the paths in other versions of this ebuild. This is how dynamic slot is intended to be used. I plan to use this functionality in Funtoo Linux to support custom kernel ebuilds.