Re: [gentoo-dev] Current unavoidable use of xz utils in Gentoo

[Eddie Chapman <eddie@ehuk.net>]

Joonas Niilola wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> I'll admit I didn't read everything, but I just want to point out you
> may not have to edit ebuilds at all. If xz-utils is package.provided 
> portage should ignore the dependency without you removing the dep from an
> ebuild. Then you can utilize /etc/portage/patches to apply any patches and
> finally try using EXTRA_ECONF and MYMESONARGS to override configure
> options via package.env.
> 
> -- juippis

Hi Joonas,

The local ebuilds in the guide were not created because of the xz-utils 
dep. If you search through ebuilds in the tree there are hundreds of 
packages that specify xz-utils as a hard dep, so yes, as you say, 
package.provided takes care of all of then.

No, the ebuilds were needed for various customisations to build 
arguments. However, the dev-libs/libxmlb ebuild is no longer needed as, 
since I wrote the guide, libxmlb 0.3.17, which makes liblzma.so.5 dep 
optional, is now in Gentoo, thanks whoever added that :-)

You might be able to dispense with the need for the separate 
net-mail/dovecot ebuild by using EXTRA_ECONF, as you say. However, 
AFAICS local dev-lang/python ebuilds are unavoidable, unfortunately, 
you'll see why if you look at the diffs for them in my guide. It would 
be wonderful if dev-lang/python made its liblzma dep optional. It would 
be a simple change to the ebuild. However, I suspect the developers 
might feel that *not* depending on liblzma.so.5 is unsupported because 
it results in Gemato failing due to lack of support in core python for 
liblzma. The only way around that issue I can see is for Gemato to 
instead use /usr/bin/xz like the rest of Portage does. If that were to 
happen then dev-lang/python could be modified to respect -lzma and I 
can't see that anything significant in Gentoo would miss it. Then if 
there are any dev-python packages that need liblzma in core python 
either presently or in future (I've not encountered any yet) then of 
course they would just need a hard dependency on dev-lang/python with 
lzma USE flag set.

I now have many Gentoo systems running without xz-utils installed (using 
my wrapper script from the guide) and I've not had a single issue 
anywhere, everything working perfectly, so I'm delighted that it has 
been possible :-)

Eddie