Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: language bindings as separate packages

[Mart Raudsepp <leio@gentoo.org>]

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On N, 2008-05-01 at 17:52 +0200, Santiago M. Mola wrote:
> On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 5:09 PM, Enrico Weigelt <weigelt@metux.de> wrote:
> >
> >  Hi folks,
> >
> >  while building yum, I again ran into trouble because one
> >  dependency has to be rebuilt with an specific useflag first
> >  (in this case it was libxml2 + python useflag). Actually,
> >  there are *lots* of these cases and (AFAIK) portage has no
> >  way for properly handling this - it's up to the individual
> >  ebuilds to check for those situations and artifically breaking
> >  the build. Of coure, breaking builds are ugly.
> 
> The proper solution for these cases is implementing USE dependencies,
> which would obsolete pkg_setup checks, and would provide portage with
> info about which USE flags are needed for each dependency. This
> feature is already implemented in other package managers (it's in
> Paludis, maybe in pkgcore too?) and I think we all look forward its
> inclusion in portage.

I do not see that as a solution, but instead maybe only a fix for the
fact that it's failing at some point in an emerge run instead of knowing
beforehand.
It still means a rebuild of the binding providing library, which
involves unnecessary recompilation of the (typically) C or C++ library,
which in some cases can be a huge time sink - that in the case that the
library in question isn't at that time pulled in (in that case the
package manager can enable it at first merge), but already installed
without the bindings USE flags.

So splitting packages is the perfect solution in my opinion, given
unlimited maintainer time and such. In real world that might be too hard
to maintain if upstream doesn't go along, but not in all cases (depends
on how much time the maintainer has, how complex the build system is,
etc).


-- 
Mart Raudsepp
Gentoo Developer
Mail: leio@gentoo.org
Weblog: http://planet.gentoo.org/developers/leio

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