Re: [gentoo-project] Call for agenda items - Council meeting 2014-04-08

[Tom Wijsman <TomWij@gentoo.org>]

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On Sun, 6 Apr 2014 16:44:50 +0100
Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccreesh@googlemail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, 06 Apr 2014 18:30:10 +0300
> Samuli Suominen <ssuominen@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > On 06/04/14 18:31, Jeroen Roovers wrote:
> > > On Sun, 06 Apr 2014 18:10:56 +0300
> > > Samuli Suominen <ssuominen@gentoo.org> wrote:
> > >
> > >> #gentoo-qa, today:
> > >>
> > >> 09:16 <@xiaomiao> if you don't ... well ... one dev more or less
> > >> isn't *that* much difference, we can deal with it
> > >> 09:17 <@xiaomiao> blah policy ... it took me months just to get
> > >> PMS fixed with a two-line patch
> > > Patrick has been around for years. :)
> > 
> > I didn't realize it was Patrick behind that nick.   Seriously, now
> > I'm even more disappointed than I was.
> 
> Why the surprise? It's a pretty safe bet that anyone who goes on
> and on about "fixing" PMS or making things "match reality" is a card
> carrying member of the troll brigade.

+1 In the context of this discussion (dynamic deps, revbumps) one needs
to recognize what the state we are in is, what problem has formed in
that state and what the possible solutions are. Then bring those
solutions up for consideration; and not just, "we now do it this way".

Here an example for the context from which this sub thread resides:

=============
= Situation =
=============

PMS says in 8.1 that dependencies must be installed and usable before a
certain point in the merge or a batch of install:

    Build dependencies (DEPEND). These must be installed and usable
    before any of the ebuild src_* phase functions is executed. These
    may not be installed at all if a binary package is being merged.

    Runtime dependencies (RDEPEND). These must be installed and usable
    before the results of an ebuild merging are treated as usable.

    Post dependencies (PDEPEND). These must be installed at some point
    before the package manager finishes the batch of installs.

===========
= Problem =
===========

Developers sometimes need to adjust the dependencies; as they might
have forgotten a runtime dependency, in which case they want to ensure
that dependency is present on the system. As it is specified in the
PMS, there's no way for that to happen in-place.

=============
= Solutions =
=============

1. Revision bump, such that the dependencies get installed.

2. Dynamic dependencies, such that the dependencies from the repository
   are always used and not those from /var/db/pkg/

3. ...

============
= Thoughts =
============

Option (1) respects the PMS, but will cause some unnecessary rebuilds;
whereas option (2), which is the default in Portage, ignores the PMS.

Currently, people are doing both; this causes some more rebuilds on the
users as well as packages breaking on other PMS consumers. Both
solutions have their (dis)advantages; choosing one or the other, if
necessary, will need some consideration.

Besides that, it'll also touch basic questions like whether Gentoo is
still a meta distribution, whether the PMS still matters nowadays,
whether the Portage tree needs to strictly respect the PMS (all
consumers) or needs to respect only one PMS implementation (Portage).

It's a recipe for discourse, bike shedding, (dis)agreements, ...

-- 
With kind regards,

Tom Wijsman (TomWij)
Gentoo Developer

E-mail address  : TomWij@gentoo.org
GPG Public Key  : 6D34E57D
GPG Fingerprint : C165 AF18 AB4C 400B C3D2  ABF0 95B2 1FCD 6D34 E57D

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