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

[Zac Medico <zmedico@gentoo.org>]

On 04/23/2011 03:28 AM, Chí-Thanh Christopher Nguyễn wrote:
> 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

It seems like new-style virtual would be introducing complexity without
adding any value here. Why not just use a pure 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

I'm not sure what you mean here. In || dependencies, it's normal to
ignore choices that are masked or unavailable, so I'm not sure that
you're suggesting anything different from the existing || behavior.

> 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

Again, I'm not sure that I understand the point of this. Since ||
dependencies already ignore unavailable or masked choices, why would
package.provided be needed?
-- 
Thanks,
Zac