[gentoo-desktop] Re: Interest inquery: kde4-nosemantic overlay

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

Michael Palimaka posted on Fri, 26 Jul 2013 04:00:30 +1000 as excerpted:

> I just saw that in Arch Linux's AUR[1], they provide a fake (empty)
> package that satisfies the package manager's dependencies, but doesn't
> actually do anything.
> 
> Perhaps this approach could help ease the maintenance burden?
> 
> [1]: https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/nepomuk-core-fake/

The way gentoo (or rather, portage) does that is package.provided... but 
that doesn't take care of ebuilds hard-enabling build-time deps, which 
then cause the build to fail when they're not found.  Those hard enablings 
must be patched out, and if that's being done, might as well patch out 
the dependency itself at the same time.

Binary-based packages don't have the build-time problem, but they /can/ 
have other problems if they were built against libraries that simply 
aren't there to provide their symbols to load.

A stub library could be built to provide the symbols and short-out the 
logic as necessary, but that's beyond /my/ expertise, anyway.

-- 
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