Re: [gentoo-dev] virtuals in /etc/portage/package.use

[Jason Stubbs <jstubbs@gentoo.org>]

On Monday 18 April 2005 16:47, Philipp Hasse wrote:
> Hi,
>
> is it true that entries starting with virtual won't work in
> /etc/portage/package.use?
> For example if I want to disable the doc use flag on the selected java
> distribution I would write: "virtual/jre -doc".
> What about adding this feature to portage?

Short answer? No.

Long answer? Here:

You're opening a can of worms there... What to do when virtual/jre and 
dev-java/blackdown-jre are both specified but in conflict? What about if 
dev-java/blackdown-jre is specified directly on the command line?

There would also be a big performance loss. For every package that is looked 
at, portage would have to check if it provides any virtuals. After that every 
one of the virtuals would have to be checked against package.use. It would 
then have to check for and resolve any conflicts.

But of course, if package.use were to support this then package.mask, 
package.unmask and package.keywords would have to support it as well. All in 
all, a big loss for a small gain.

Regards,
Jason Stubbs
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