[gentoo-amd64] Re: Emerge Ignores Newer Ebuilds If Older Given In Package.Provided

[Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net>]

Frank Peters posted on Wed, 26 May 2010 20:35:12 -0400 as excerpted:

> In my opinion, package.provided should accomplish just what the name
> implies.  It should indicate that the Gentoo user has compiled his own
> version of an ebuild (for whatever reason) and if a newer ebuild exists,
> regardless of dependencies, this should be indicated to the user (as it
> is with a normally emerged ebuild).

You're right, there's some collision between the name and assumptions for 
package.provided, and the assumptions for ordinary dependency resolution 
vs. those for --deep.  The package.provided functionality definitely 
assumes that users do NOT want --deep functionality in regard to it.

FWIW, I prefer the current functionality, and actually, for the few 
packages I place in package.provided, this is what I have, with the 
obvious implications:

sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-2.6.999
mail-mta/ssmtp-999
mail-client/mailx-999
x11-apps/xsm-999
x11-terms/xterm-999

Given the 999 version numbers, it's pretty obvious that my intent is don't 
EVER merge these.  But actually, the kernel is the only one I actually 
/do/ provide on my own.  The others I simply don't want on my system, and 
arguably they shouldn't be dependencies of anything I have installed, at 
all.

I avoid busybox too, with this entry in the packages file since it's a 
profile dependency:

-*sys-apps/busybox

I used to do similar with ssh, when I only had the single stand-alone 
system, but now I use ssh to copy updates to my netbook, from the build 
image on my main machine, so I obviously have it installed on both.  But 
why it's part of the default profile, I don't know, and by virtue of the 
packages file, it wasn't, here, for many years.

But I can see that if people are installing a particular version manually, 
and putting that specific version in package.provided to tell portage 
about it, they'd expect to be notified on --update --deep when an update 
came along, just as they'd normally be upgraded if it were installed 
normally (except that they'd only be notified, not auto-upgraded, with 
package.provided, because portage couldn't auto-remove the previous 
version like it'd do if it installed the package, so that'd have to be 
done manually).

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman