Re: [gentoo-dev] GLEP ??: Metapackages

[Stephen Bennett <spb@gentoo.org>]

On Mon, 2005-03-07 at 11:26 +0100, Thomas de Grenier de Latour wrote:
> So, in short, dropping the "virtuals" file is a regression imho,
> because it makes portage behavior less deterministic; it will
> depend more on the history of user actions (calls to emerge), and
> less on user prefs, making it harder to understand and control.

What's been discussed, but isn't in the GLEP draft, is a /etc/portage
file to let you override metapackage dependencies. It's not in there
because the syntax and implementation hasn't been worked out fully, but
it should work akin to /etc/portage/virtuals.

> Oh, and btw, this lack of "virtuals" prefs file may also be a
> problem for official profiles. For instance, I see that "base"
> currently has "virtual/jdk  dev-java/blackdown-jdk", whereas ppc
> profiles override that with "virtual/jdk  dev-java/ibm-jdk-bin".
> And i guess they have good reasons to do so... How will that be
> handled with metapkgs? By having numerous "arch? ( ... )" in the
> DEPEND string? 

It could be done with arch? ( ) in the DEPEND string, or just by not
keywording packages on a given arch, or masking them in the profile. The
dependency resolver is already fully able to cope with that sort of
situation, whereas the current virtuals mechanism isn't.

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