Re: [gentoo-dev] RDEPENDing on packages from overlays?

[Zac Medico <zmedico@gentoo.org>]

On 04/22/2011 11:05 PM, Eray Aslan wrote:
> 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.  Additionally, keeping track of all the overlays and their
> package versions, USE flags and flag changes are potentially too much to
> track.  We will be making changes to a virtual package without testing
> whether it works.

I would assume that it's the overlay maintainers' responsibility to test
and report any problems. Any such problems would should affect the
overlay users, so it shouldn't cause any regression for users who don't
choose to use the overlay.

> On the other hand, we are making life (unneccesarily?) difficult for
> overlay users by not incorporating the requested changes to the official
> tree.

I don't imagine it's that much work to maintain a fork of the virtual.
It's just an inconvenience for users since the version from the overlay
might become temporarily outdated and cause problems with dependency
resolution.

> Comments on how to proceed?

Either way is fine. It's just a matter of whether or not collaboration
with the overlay is worthy of your time.

> Is it OK for a virtual to list a package
> which is in an overlay in RDEPEND?

Yes, that's fine. For || dependencies, repoman will be satisfied as long
as there at least one provider available for a given profile.
-- 
Thanks,
Zac