On Sunday 19 September 2004 16:56, Dan Armak wrote:
> On Sunday 19 September 2004 07:43, Duncan wrote:
> > Then, at the top of the file put a big hairy warning about how some
> > package components, particularly in kdebase, are depended on by others,
> > and to disable the use flag and recompile all packages if there are
> > dependency issues, and then leave everything else up to the user.  Any
> > bugs on related dependency issues would be marked invalid, see the
> > warning in the file, etc. so it wouldn't become a big support issue.
>
> As you say, this solution is hairy (or anything else that doesn't create
> real separate ebuilds for the separate apps). I personally don't like it at
> all and don't really want to see it happen even as an alternative to
> nothing at all, because it's so ugly. Of course, it's very easy to
> implement, but it takes away all the advantages of having a proper package
> manager - all the advantages of using portage rather than state-less
> invocations on the order of 'ebuild.sh file.ebuild'...
>
> And of course this solution entails more or less not supporting it despite
> having it in the portage tree - marking related bugs as invalid etc. That's
> another reason I don't like it.
>
> Perhaps I don't have the right to say this at this point, having been
> incative for over a year, but this solution simply takes away too much
> functionality and support from the user in order to decrease the
> maintainer's workload.

Well, I'll second you in any case. It is not a solution and offering something 
willingly and then saying it is unsupported is in these kinds of cases a 
medicine worse than the cure. The only "possible" solution I see would 
involve useflags and useflag dependencies (still "in the works"). But I agree 
that we must avoid in any case to get back the stateless mess that the lack 
of dependency tracking entails.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@gentoo.org
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net