Re: [gentoo-dev] Dependencies default to accept any slot value acceptable (:*), can we default to :0 instead?

[heroxbd@gentoo.org]

Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> writes:

> A new slot of a package (which doesn't exist today) may or may not
> work with any ebuild in the system.  Should it be considered a best
> practice then to specify || deps with all slots that are known to work
> in the tree?  Or should we just trust to luck and consider it
> acceptable for maintainers to add new slots of commonly-used libs and
> users and downstream maintainers can deal with the resulting breakage?
>
> Library maintainers don't seem to like dealing with that, so they just
> stick new slots in an entirely new package, and then we end up with
> all the || dependencies anyway and we make no use of the nice slot
> syntax because it is prone to breakage.
>
> It seems like the current way we handle slots for dependencies works
> just fine until somebody actually tries to introduce a new slot for a
> package, and then a whole pile of assumptions comes crashing down.

How about defining a QA workflow for introducing a new slot of a
library, such as "mask it and open a tracker bug until every individual
reverse dependencies are checked"?

Benda