[gentoo-dev] Re: [RFC] PROPERTIES=set for meta-packages that should behave like package sets

[Steve Long <slong@rathaus.eclipse.co.uk>]

Zac Medico wrote:

> Rémi Cardona wrote:
>> Zac Medico a écrit :
>>> Please consider a PROPERTIES=set value that allows an ebuild to
>>> indicate that it should behave like a package set when selected on
>>> the command line. This is behavior is somewhat difficult to describe
>>> in words but the following example should be sufficient to convey
>>> the general idea.
>> 
>> As one of the maintainers of the gnome-base/gnome meta, I fail to see
>> the usefulness of such a change. We have yet to ask users to rebuild
>> "gnome" completely. Do you have any specific use cases (maybe coming
>> from the KDE herd, since you used the kde meta as an example) ?
>> 
>> The one thing that bothers me about this is consistency: if, say, xfce
>> (let's change ;) ) decides to use PROPERTIES=set, users will have a
>> different experience with their ebuild than with the other metas we
>> currently ship.
>>
Only when they consciously use the set syntax, surely?
 
>> All in all, I'm not really against such a change, however I really fail
>> to see the win for everyone, end-users included.
> 
> Over the course of the discussion I've revised the idea so that it
> essentially represents a way to define a package set, without any
> changes to existing behavior. What will change is that we will have
> a new way to define package sets, based on ebuilds.

Makes sense to me, though not sure you need the mapping file. I'm perfectly
happy about emerge -uDN @kde-meta say, updating all kde-meta packages I
might have installed; I take it that after emerge kde-meta to install, and
then removing some of the packages, the user could continue to reference
the set for upgrade, without portage reinstalling those?