Re: [gentoo-dev] Is || ( Atom... ) broken?

[James Potts <arek75@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jul 7, 2014 at 6:14 AM, Rich Freeman <rich0@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jul 7, 2014 at 6:14 AM, Greg Turner <gmt@malth.us> wrote:
> > WTF is up with it?  Why does it love the first Atom so much more than the
> > others?
> >
> > It could be such a useful feature, but, in practice, it just never seems to
> > do what I want it to.  Is it a bug?
>
> Well, more like unspecified behavior.  PMS just says that the PM has
> to accept any package in the list.  It is silent on the matter of
> which one is to be preferred, or to what degree.
>
> As we saw with upower portage will jump through quite a few hoops to
> install the first dependency - it doesn't always figure out that
> installing one of the others is easier.  It is a bit hard to
> algorithmically define "easier" - should portage favor fewer package
> installs, fewer removals, fewer config file changes, avoiding changing
> the init system (and what constitutes an init system), etc?  Plus,
> there are a lot of potential permutations to deal with.
>
> You'd probably need to be more specific as to what is going on to get further.
>
> I think most would agree that there is room for improvement here.
>
> Rich
>

In this case, it would be nice if Portage would see if one package of
the set could be resolved without blocks or required config changes
(i.e. if one package can be installed *now* choose it over
earlier-listed not-installable packages).  The problem with this is
that it would take longer to resolve || () deps if the first one isn't
installable.  Not only that, but the workaround is easy:  Either
install the package you want first (upower-pm-utils, for example), or
at the same time as your "target" package, so I also don't see this as
high-priority.  I also don't see this as something needing changed in
PMS, as other PMs have different ways of handling the issue.

--James