On 07/30/2012 03:36 AM, Dirkjan Ochtman wrote:
> On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 4:13 AM, Mike Gilbert <floppym@gentoo.org> wrote:
>> Is anyone in favor or opposed to this package rename idea? Are there any
>> better ideas?
> I've always thought renaming python-3 to python3 is faux-namespacing,
> and the thing SLOTs are supposed to help out with. Why aren't SLOTs
> helping us with this?

Portage will attempt to upgrade software to a newer SLOT if it will
satisfy a dependency. This works when you cannot select versions via
eselect, but it causes problems when you can. There is no way to tell it
to prefer the selected version upgrades in other slots unless the
selected version cannot satisfy it.

> The problem I have with it is that inevitably there's going to be a
> time we don't care about python-2 anymore, and we'll be stuck with the
> python3 package name (or have to go through annoying mechanics to
> rename it back).

I think that having to switch back would cause far less pain than the
current situation would, assuming that we ever do. If the python
developers refuse to make python 2.8, it is likely that someone else will.

> I agree that installing both is probably overkill for most users. I
> think the solution is somewhere outside the dev-lang/python package,
> though, in having the system set or portage or whatever the hell it is
> that first pulls in python prefer python-2.

This would require amending the package manager specification.