Re: [gentoo-dev] ebuild design issue regarding some {I need the lib and api only}-DEPENDs

[Ciaran McCreesh <ciaranm@gentoo.org>]

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On Thu, 18 Aug 2005 10:13:33 -0500 Lance Albertson
<ramereth@gentoo.org> wrote:
| bind and bind-tools is split ;) Why is it so bad to split packages?
| (I'm just curious) Seems a bit odd that we can't have a library only,
| client only, etc package like the other distros. Of course, I
| understand that we could use useflags for that, but is that really
| the best solution for this particular issue?

We can't use USE flags because portage won't let us. There's been a bug
open about USE deps for yeaaaarrrrss.

Plus, the other issue... Say your package depends upon mysql, then
someone comes along and splits mysql via USE flags. You'll then need to
update your package to depend upon, say, mysql[client] because the
default behaviour will be to not require any particular USE flag to be
enabled.

TGL had a rather interesting proposal regarding 'parts', which are
similar to USE flags but the default behaviour is to depend upon a
package with all parts enabled unless explicitly indicated otherwise.
You may wish to find it and flesh it out some more.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Vim, Shell tools, Fluxbox, Cron)
Mail            : ciaranm at gentoo.org
Web             : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm


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