[gentoo-dev] reconciling new-style virtuals with overlays, was: RDEPENDing on packages from overlays?

["Chí-Thanh Christopher Nguyễn" <chithanh@gentoo.org>]

Eray Aslan schrieb:
> https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=364445
> https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=364401
>
> Basically, there are requests to add packages to RDEPEND in virtual/mda
> and virtual/mta that are not in the official tree but in sunrise.
>
> On one side, *DEPENDing on a package outside the tree doesn't seem
> right.

I understand that the push to remove old-style virtuals from the main
tree is because they cause headaches for the package managers during
dependency calculation. I also understand that existing EAPIs will not
be amended to forbid old-style virtuals.

Would it make sense to do the following:
(1) make all new-style virtuals additionally depend on an old-style
virtual (a new category might be appropriate)
(2) ebuilds in overlays can PROVIDE the old-style virtual
(3) in a future EAPI, package managers are allowed to ignore the
old-style virtual dependency for packages which are not already installed

If directly including installed old-style virtual packages in the
dependency calculations is not feasible, (3) could be implemented
through modifying package.provided like it is already done for
package.{keywords,mask,use} after profile/ updates


Regards,
Chi-Thanh Christopher Nguyen