Re: [gentoo-user] Re: I don't understand Perl. What do I do after an update?

[Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com>]

On Wednesday 21 July 2010 23:14:35 covici@ccs.covici.com wrote:
> > This is a painful process. It's enough to drive a sysadmin to drink or
> > (god  forbid), to Windows. Portage can't help as the ebuild doesn't know
> > what you have installed. So you must run a script to go and dig out all
> > this crap for you.
> >
> > 
> >
> > All I can say is, every day I get down on my knees and offer thanks that
> > perl  is not slotted.
> 
> But portage should be sensible enough to either run this for you, or
> stop emerging -- I had a lot of trouble during the last update where I
> kept getting errors and I emerged a couple of them before I knew I had
> to run perl-cleaner.

You haven't thought this through and haven't consider how portage knows what 
to do.

Portage doesn't do it because portage can't.
You want portage to do it != portage can do it.

Consider this:

[I] dev-lang/perl
     Installed versions:  5.12.1-r1(23:11:24 21/07/10)(berkdb gdbm -build -
debug -doc -ithreads)

[I] dev-perl/DateManip
     Installed versions:  5.56(19:39:11 17/07/10)(-test)


When I upgraded perl to 5.12.1-r1, DateManip was not upgraded. Why not? 
because it's version number did not change and that is the ONLY thing portage 
considers. DateManip depends on perl, not on =perl-whatever-I-used-to-have

So portage does not know of the link between these two things and cannot take 
them into account. Portage won't be expanded anytime soon either - you saw how 
long it took for perl-cleaner to run, must portage go through something like 
that with every emerge?

Similarly, one could say portage should detect rev-dep breakage. Surprise! It 
doesn't. revdep-rebuild does that (comparable to perl-cleaner) and you know 
how long that takes to run.

So you wasted some time with an upgrade. Well that's a shame. But we don't 
care much, especially if you don't read the elog messages. If you feel that 
portage should does this automagically, and have a plan to make it run REAL 
quick, and have proven, workable, debugged, solid, stable patches, then I'm 
sure Zac would be very happy indeed to hear from you.

In the meantime, read the elog messages.


-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com