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

[Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org>]

On Sat, Jun 14, 2014 at 12:31 PM, Ciaran McCreesh
<ciaran.mccreesh@googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 14 Jun 2014 12:17:52 -0400
> Alexandre Rostovtsev <tetromino@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> On Sat, 2014-06-14 at 16:56 +0100, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
>> > On Sat, 14 Jun 2014 11:50:29 -0400
>> > Alexandre Rostovtsev <tetromino@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> > > On Sat, 2014-06-14 at 16:13 +0100, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
>> > > > On Sat, 14 Jun 2014 16:41:51 +0200
>> > > > Michał Górny <mgorny@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> > > > > However, this means that we force much more rebuilds than
>> > > > > necessary.
>> > > >
>> > > > This shouldn't be considered to be a problem.
>> > >
>> > > This would be suicide for Gentoo as a distro. Organizations that
>> > > have a dedicated build server and a standardized /etc/portage
>> > > config tree pushed to all user machines could rebuild half of
>> > > @world once a week. Individual users running Gentoo on a single
>> > > workstation or server can't and won't.
>> >
>> > Then either Gentoo should ship binary packages, or the user should
>> > find another distribution.
>> >
>> > Gentoo *already* does a full rebuild for packages whose bumps or
>> > revbumps just result in one text file changing. So long as there
>> > isn't a mechanism and full ebuild support in place to prevent this,
>> > it's a silly argument.
>>
>> You don't see the difference between unnecessarily rebuilding one
>> package (because a text file changed) and unnecessarily rebuilding a
>> hundred packages (because libfoo added a new function)? Especially
>> since maintainers of packages with long compile times understandably
>> tend to be a bit conservative with their revision bumps, but have no
>> control over when their package's dependencies get subslotbumped.
>
> So why isn't there a call for a feature to make ebuilds not recompile
> the nine out of ten libraries and binaries that they provide that
> haven't changed on a bump?

This argument basically amounts to Portage isn't perfect, therefore we
shouldn't make it better.

The fact that some events cause unnecessary rebuilds doesn't mean that
we need to accept that other events cause unnecessary rebuilds.

Otherwise, who needs subslots at all - just make portage rebuild every
installed package on every install and we'll never be inconsistent.
:)

Rich