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

[Zac Medico <zmedico@gentoo.org>]

On 04/23/2011 06:05 AM, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
>>>>>> On Sat, 23 Apr 2011, Thomas Sachau wrote:
> 
>> If e.g. kde and sunrise overlay both provide an mta, they would both
>> need a fork of virtual/mta. Now one of those forks will be preferred
>> and used, e.g. the kde one. This means, that you cannot install the
>> mta from sunrise to satisfy the virtual without additional manual
>> work.
> 
> So far this is only a hypothetical example, as there is no MTA package
> in the KDE overlay. As long as sunrise is the only overlay providing
> such a package, I don't see how maintaining a fork of the virtual
> would be problematic. Any collision scenarios can be solved when they
> really arise (if ever).
> 
>> The only way to solve this properly without asking the user to
>> manually adjust things is to just add all mtas from overlays (maybe
>> restricted to dev-controlled or -managed overlays) to virtual/mta in
>> the main tree.
> 
> The additional entries in the any-of-many dependency are not an issue.
> But the problem that I see with this approach is that a maintainer of
> a package depending on the virtual would have to test if his package
> works with those additional dependencies from overlays. I'd rather not
> impose such an additional burden upon maintainers of main tree
> packages.

If people are going to use overlays to override the virtuals anyway,
then the net effect is practically the same. The only difference is
whether the new-style virtual is provided by the main tree or by the
overlay.
-- 
Thanks,
Zac