On Wed, 30 Oct 2019 09:26:09 -0500
William Hubbs <williamh@gentoo.org> wrote:

> I don't know portage internals, so I have no idea what the deal with
> this is or how to fix it.
> 
> Did you report it to the portage team?

Report what?

1. Didn't have access to the box
2. No way to even conceive of producing enough information to replicate
it reliably enough that somebody could anticipate digging into the why.

> 
> I've noticed it gets messy very quickly if you wait a while to upgrade
> your system also, so I would be curious how long the user waited to do
> an upgrade?

And yeah, it was one of those cases of "bad sync length", the user in
question inherited the box from somebody else, and they were left to
pick up the pieces where the other person left off.

And one of the common things I see that frustrates me, is generally,
when you see these mountains of mess, somebody tries to argue its the
*users* fault for not updating more frequently.

But IMO, that's a rather distasteful buck-pass.

The duty of a linux vendor/linux vendor maintainer is to isolate users
from these kinds of problems, and we're clearly failing in this way.
> 
> Python is also more complex than most things because we allow multiple
> versions.
> 
> There's no way to know whether removing virtual/rust will cause these
> kinds of issues, so I'm still not convinced that we shouldn't remove
> it.

In light of the aforementioned axiom of "protect the user from messes",
I think it makes sense to approach this from the perspective of:

  If we imagine it could possibly cause a problem, until we prove it
  doesn't and can't, we must assume it _will_