Re: [gentoo-user] Re: evdev broken?

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

On Wednesday 20 July 2011 14:16:06 Grant Edwards did opine thusly:
> On 2011-07-20, Mick <michaelkintzios@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Every time after you emerge xorg you're meant to remerge its
> > drivers (evdev being one of them).  Usually there is some elog
> > message telling you to run
> > 
> > qfile to find what is need to be reinstalled:
> >   qlist -I -C x11-drivers/
> 
> I've always wondered why, if portage knows that has to be done,
> can't portage just go ahead and do it?

Actually not. Portage doesn't know it has to be done, the ebuild dev 
knows and stuck a literal message in one of the post_() functions.

To do what you mention, the driver would have to depend on xorg, but 
in fact xorg-server depends on the xorg-drivers meta package, which in 
turn depends on the drivers defined in USE.

In theory, one could use PDEPEND I suppose, but I also suspect that 
would cause circular dependencies. The other option is to put an 
emerge call in pkg_postinst() but that would be heavily frowned upon 
as

- it's a highly unusual solution and just an ugly hack
- it wreaks the dep graph that emerge generates
- stuff will get emerged that isn't visible at the beginning
- portage can't definitively tell you before you start that the 
drivers will be remerged


-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com