Re: [gentoo-dev] Modular X porting: dependency changes

[Jason Stubbs <jstubbs@gentoo.org>]

On Wednesday 23 November 2005 00:46, Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> Doug Goldstein wrote:
> > I thought GLEP 37 was a way out kind of thing. Like several months if
> > not a year before it can be done.
>
> I figured about the same, but
> https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=112896#c16 begs to differ.

The glep was originally posted 30th April...

The idea was already fairly solid at that time and required minimal changes to 
portage for it to "just work". Pretty much only one actually - the hardcoded 
'sanity check' of not being able to install packages of category "virtual" 
was removed. Hence, as per the backwards compatibility section of the glep, 
all current portages are capable of handling virtuals that are regular 
packages. The largest holdup was waiting for backwards compatibility to 
become viable.

There are really only two other parts to the glep; consistency checking and 
user overrides. The current method of overriding will still work fine and 
only becomes an issue when the first virtual that covers a set of packages 
comes into existence. As for consistency checking, it has a relatively small 
chance of being useful in my opinion. Take the following:

# emerge virtual/x11
# emerge -C x11-base/xorg-x11
# emerge x11-libs/qt
(Whoops!)

In other words, it's a situtation that is possible already. The solution is to 
always use --deep when calculating dependencies, which I'm working on at the 
moment. There are a couple of other portage-side implementation issues that 
have come up, but the more difficult ones have become clearer over time. I'll 
dust of the GLEP and repost it later this week and see if we can't get it 
finalized...

--
Jason Stubbs
-- 
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