Re: [gentoo-dev] sawfish-0.38.ebuild

[Terje Kvernes <terjekv@math.uio.no>]

Daniel Robbins <drobbins@gentoo.org> writes:

> On Mon, Jul 09, 2001 at 04:40:02PM +0200, Terje Kvernes wrote:
>  
> > what you're basically saying is that it's up to the person making
> > each build to make the choice of which lib to prioritize.
> > personally, I find this rather icky, because it demands that the
> > person installing the packages can't say "media(gdkpixbuf,imlib)
> > and be sure that nothing ever needing just gdkpixbuf won't install
> > imlib.
> 
> The problem is that as of right now, our USE variables don't express
> preference, just whether a particular extension is acceptable or
> not.

  right, that's the problem. the question is how bad a problem it is.
  I have _no_ big issues with it currently, I'm just wondering if it's
  something that should be addressed.
 
> There may be applications that can link to *both* gdkpixbuf and
> imlib. There are really two easy solutions; and ebuild can prefer
> the more advanced replacement if defined, or if there is an
> either/or choice (if it's not possible to add support for both), we
> can create two ebuilds:
> 
> foo-gdkpixbuf
> foo-imlib

  which means someone[tm] will have to maintain two different builds
  of what is practically the same package. it's not a very clean
  solution.
 
> The either/or option doesn't seem to happen *too* often, so this
> solution could work too.

  yeah, and as long as people keep their things up to date, sure.
  honestly, I'm not really worried, but it might become a case when
  foo has a security-issue, and the person packing it only uses
  foo-bar, and doesn't see foo-baz because it's not his domain.

  (call me paranoid, but I've had this crash on me with rpm, where the
  new package suddenly didn't cover all the same files because it came
  from another packager)

> The harder third option is to increase the expressiveness of our USE
> syntax, which *is* an option but I'd like to try the above solutions
> first. 

  okies. :-)

> The advantage to our current approach to USE is that it's quite
> straightforward. If something is in USE, the ebuild will build-in
> that functionality if it can. That's easy for new users to
> understand.

  true. then again, I really don't see how making USE express
  preference will manage to bite anyone. it does pretty much what
  you'd expect, it USEs the needed (and possible to use) packages in
  the given order. if both can be used, both are used. the current
  action isn't any more apparent, since you don't _know_ which of the
  packages will be used. you'll have to read the ebuild-file.

  I'm not familiar enough with freeBSD to know how they solve these
  cases. I looked a bit over the ports-documentation from the net, but
  didn't find anything. I'm guessing it's not a big case in reality.

-- 
Terje