[gentoo-portage-dev] Feature Request for portage

[gentoo-portage-dev] Feature Request for portage

[Paul Varner]

Background: I have been bitten a couple of times by ebuilds adding USE
flags to newer versions of the ebuild.  This has caused me to break
things on my system when performing a package upgrade through portage.

Example: pam-0.77 introduced the pwdb USE flag, which wasn't used in the
previous ebuild.  Thus when I upgraded, I rebuilt PAM without pwdb
support and broke the ability of the qpopper program to authenticate
users on my email server. The previous version of the ebuild compiled in
support for pwdb without a USE flag, so the flag was not set on my
system to be used, as I was unaware of the need for it.

Solution: Enable the pwdb USE flag and recompile PAM.  Unfortunately,
the machine this broke on is a lowly Pentium 266, so compiling PAM takes
about 30-40 minutes.

Proposed feature: When doing an emerge -pv, display some indication that
a USE flag is changed in the new version of the ebuild.  Since I always
run an emerge -pv to verify settings, this would help to catch the
situations where a USE flag has been changed between ebuilds.  This
would serve as an indicator that I need to do some research on the
possible changes to functionality to the package before upgrading the
package.

Going to the 20,000 foot level I would state the requirement is that
portage should have the capability to track and display USE flag changes
between versions of ebuilds.
-- 
My Gentoo stuff: http://varnerfamily.org/pvarner/gentoo

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Re: [gentoo-portage-dev] Feature Request for portage

[R. C. James Harlow]

On Wednesday 11 February 2004 05:04, Paul Varner wrote:
> Going to the 20,000 foot level I would state the requirement is that
> portage should have the capability to track and display USE flag
> changes 

Metadata changes. ;-)

> between versions of ebuilds. 

S'a good idea.

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