moduledb in Paludis

Update: Check this for the current solution.

With portage I was quite often using module-rebuild, more or less after every kernel update and thus I thought it would be nice to make something similar for Paludis, especially as it seemed really simple with Paludis' Hooks and Sets.

So I made two simple hooks:

• ${paludis_confdir}/hooks/ebuild_postinst_post/modules_set_add.bash
• ${paludis_confdir}/hooks/ebuild_postrm_post/modules_set_rm.bash

And a simple one-liner to import entries from the moduledb:

sed -e 's/.*:/* =/' /var/lib/module-rebuild/moduledb > ${PALUDIS_CONFDIR}/sets/modules.conf

But then I realized that it's not so perfect:

• Won't work when using Environment != Paludis ( ${PALUDIS_CONFDIR} won't be reliable then )
• To actually rebuild the modules one has to use: paludis --dl-reinstall always --dl-deps-default discard -i modules and hope that the deps are satisfied :]
• Doubles the work of the linux-mod.eclass

So I decided to talk with Ciaran about the above issues. Yet while we were talking he implemented a new paludis option (--dl-reinstall-targets auto|always|never), which affects the way paludis treats targets. Up till now the default "auto" was always used(="never" for sets and "always" for ordinary packages). When it is released the module rebuild will be simply done with:

paludis --dl-reinstall-targets always -i modules and there won't be any risk of missing deps.

Going further ciaran thought about allowing bash scripts in sets/, in short paludis runs a foo.bash script from sets/ and its output is interpreted as foo set. The moment it is implemented (probably today) and released we can forget about the two hooks above and make a modules.bash similar to the import one-liner.

So don't forget to update Paludis when it's out ;]