Re: [gentoo-user] Gentoo gets as bad SuSE: Circular dependencies [WAS: Thank you Gentoo devs]

[Enrico Weigelt <weigelt@metux.de>]

* Kent Fredric <kentfredric@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi folks,

> Imo, the cyclic dep problem could be solved as thus,
> 
> A depends B
>    B depends  C||A
> 
> Where C is a minimalist subset of A required for building B, 
> which is only depended on if A is not present.
> A is also a replacement for C.

Beware of conflicts !
AFAIK portage cannot handle them by itself, instead aborts and 
leaves the job to the user.

> So the flow would go like such.
> 
> Emerge A:
>  * depends on b
>     * A is missing, so depend on C
> *emerges C*
> *emerges B*
> *removes C*  <-- otherwise  A & C containing the same files = headache
> *emerges A*

Who exactly controls this flow ?
portage or the user ? 

> Computers exist to make our life easier, not the other way around :)

ACK. An "ideal" system would be able to do it all alone, the user 
just tells what he wants. Of course ideal != realistic, but IMHO 
its good to go into the ideal direction as far as possible.

BTW: some people expressed (within this thread), that Gentoo was too 
easy to use and should be made more complicated. Funny, isn't it ?


Ah, just in case that 99% of the people didn't actually read my 
postings, I'll just say it again:

The circular dependencies between Xserver and drivers do not come 
from upstream. They're artificial. If we just want an simple-to-use
package which gets the Xserver *and* drivers based on useflags
(which IMHO is an good idea), it's quite trivial to do this by an 
virtual/meta package. I've did it and it works good. You can get
it from my overlay via CVS:

CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@nibiru.metux.de:/repositories/cvs/oss-qm
password: annymous
module: oss-qm-overlay
  

cu
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