Re: [gentoo-dev] Subslots: should they be bumped like SONAME or on any ABI changes?

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Mon, Jun 16, 2014 at 5:47 AM, Pacho Ramos <pacho@gentoo.org> wrote:
> El sáb, 14-06-2014 a las 12:50 -0400, Alexandre Rostovtsev escribió:
> [...]
>> A solution to unnecessary rebuilds in these situations, as well as for
>> case (1), might be in the form of subslots as a key:value list, with
>> different users subscribing to be rebuilt for specific keys.
>
> I guess https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=462138 will interest you
> too :)

While the pain-vs-gain argument in that bug makes some sense, I don't
buy the argument that the purpose of subslots is to force necessary
rebuilds vs prevent unnecessary ones.  Those are really equivalent,
since a crude algorithm would be to simply rebuild every package
anytime any package changes.  Subslots prevent you from having to
rebuild unnecessary packages by identifying the packages that actually
need to be rebuilt.

The fact that we already have maintainers setting sublots on virtuals
suggests to me that this feature should be given more consideration.
Given a choice of a rats-nest of virtuals that need to be updated
anytime there is a bump and mapped to a main subslot that doesn't mean
anything or just having a dictionary on the packages that need it, the
latter seems simpler for everybody.  In the case where a single
subslot is needed the whole thing reduces to EAPI5.

Rich