Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: On the good usage of subslots

[Alexis Ballier <aballier@gentoo.org>]

On Sat, 09 Feb 2013 23:38:35 +1100
Michael Palimaka <kensington@gentoo.org> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> On 9/02/2013 23:15, Alexis Ballier wrote:
> > Dear fellow developers,
> >
> > I hope this will be trivial to most of you but after seeing bug
> > #455900 and the vast majority of developers not even thinking twice
> > before sedding their dep strings, I believe this needs some
> > attention.
> 
> What is wrong with maintainers just updating their dependencies in
> this fashion? Surely the onus in this case is on package maintainers
> setting sensible subslots (which is indeed what you appear to be
> saying below)?

If subslot does not represent ABI then it's wrong to set such := deps:
By setting them you are forcing your users to needlessly rebuild your
package.
Think about glib: gobject-introspection needs to be rebuilt after each
glib update. glib maintainers will likely want glib to have ${PV} as
subslot and let gobject-introspection := depend on it. Packages that do
not break with minor updates of glib (ie 99% of them) should not :=
depend on glib, even if it has a subslot.

What I wanted to say could be summarized as: Please define what your
subslot means when you define one and please check if that is the
meaning you want to give it when you set := deps.

Alexis.