Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] PROPERTIES=set for meta-packages that should behave like package sets

[Zac Medico <zmedico@gentoo.org>]

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Marius Mauch wrote:
> On Sat, 27 Sep 2008 17:21:18 -0700
> Zac Medico <zmedico@gentoo.org> wrote:
> 
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>>
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> Please consider a PROPERTIES=set value that allows an ebuild to
>> indicate that it should behave like a package set when selected on
>> the command line. This is behavior is somewhat difficult to describe
>> in words but the following example should be sufficient to convey
>> the general idea. Consider a case where all of the kde-base/*-meta
>> packages exhibit the "set" property, and these packages and their
>> dependencies are currently installed. In such a case, the default
>> behavior for a command such as `emerge kde-base/kde-meta` should be
>> to reinstall the the selected kde-base/kde-meta ebuild and the set
>> of packages which includes it's direct dependencies and it's
>> recursive "set" dependencies. So, assuming that all USE flags are
>> enabled for the selected kde-base/kde-meta ebuild, it would
>> reinstall the direct dependencies of kdeartwork-meta, kdebase-meta,
>> kdeedu-meta, kdegames-meta, kdegraphics-meta, kdemultimedia-meta,
>> kdenetwork-meta, kdetoys-meta, kdeutils-meta, and
>> kdeaccessibility-meta ebuilds. Similarly, the default behavior for a
>> command such as `emerge --unmerge kde-base/kde-meta` would be to
>> uninstall the same set of packages.
> 
> I'm not convinced that this is a good idea if some packages suddenly
> behave _vastly_ different than others (from a users POV) without any
> clear indication (a -meta somewhere in the name IMO doesn't count).
> 
> Maybe we can just create a PackageSet class that wraps a package though
> to get the same behavior while keeping the two behaviors separated by
> syntax.

Some some sort of mapping of packages into sets space does seem
better than changing the behavior of these packages other cases.
However, PROPERTIES=set will still be useful for governing
recursion, since recursion into dependencies is probably not desired
for non-meta packages in the same sense that it might be desired for
meta-packages.
- --
Thanks,
Zac
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