Re: [gentoo-dev] What are blocks used for?

[Donnie Berkholz <dberkholz@gentoo.org>]

On 06:24 Wed 16 Apr     , Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> What all are blocks used for?
> 
> a) Marking that two unrelated packages are mutually incompatible at
> runtime because they happen to collide, for example on a commonly named
> executable.
> 
> b) Marking that two related implementations are mutually incompatible at
> runtime because they both provide the same binary.
> 
> c) Marking that a file that used to be provided by one package is now
> provided by another package that is either depending upon or depended
> upon by the original package.
> 
> d) Marking that a package has been moved into another package.
> 
> Are there any other uses?

A slight tweak that you may have already considered: a single package is 
split into multiple packages with a metabuild (named the same as the 
original single package) in a newer version -- for example, modularized 
X.

> For future EAPIs, being able to tell the package manager that your
> block is of one of the types above will help the package manager smooth
> out the upgrade path for users. For example, for class d) blocks such
> as the recent coreutils / mktemp mess, the package manager can suggest
> to the user to install the new package and then uninstall the old
> package, rather than forcing the user to uninstall the old package by
> hand (possibly leaving their system without critical utilities) and then
> install the new package.
> 
> I strongly suspect that in many (but not all) cases the package manager
> could be making users' lives a lot easier than it currently is...

Sounds like a great idea.

Thanks,
Donnie
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