Re: [gentoo-dev] GLEP ??: Metapackages

[Alec Warner <warnera6@egr.msu.edu>]

Stephen Bennett wrote:

>As those who hang around in the mysterious realms of Portage development
>may know, there's some feeling around that the current system of virtual
>packages has some serious limitations. The currently-proposed
>alternative (as discussed previously, notably in
>http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/18922), involves a
>system of metapackages. These would essentially consist of a 
>non-installable ebuild that consists entirely of a set of dependency
>information. Once the dependencies for the metapackage are satisfied,
>it's considered to be installed, and packages depending on it can go
>ahead and be built.
>
>This approach brings several advantages over the current system,
>particularly: 
>- Allowing one version of a package to provide a different version of a
>virtual, where these are necessary.
>- Fixing the screwup with .51's virtual handling whereby gcc-2.95.x has
>PROVIDE="sys-apps/texinfo", a package depends on >=texinfo-4.6, so
>portage tries to install >=gcc-4.6.
>- Provides, in one easily accessible place, a list of package that could
>be used to satisfy the dependency. This has advantages for speed (no
>searching the tree for PROVIDEs) and for user-friendliness.
>
>Anyway, with portage development as it is now, this got brought up
>again, and the current state of the GLEP can be found at
>http://dev.gentoo.org/~spb/metapkg-glep.txt. Comments/suggestions/flames
>welcome.
>
>  
>
As long as you keep the PROVIDES line in the ebuild.  Assuming repoman 
does full tree check  when commiting it can make sure that all packages 
that PROVIDE virtual also exist in the metapackage.  That would be my 
only concern, people forgetting to add lines to the correct files :)

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