On Sat, 07 Jun 2014 17:20:22 -0700, walt wrote:

> On 06/07/2014 12:56 AM, Hans de Graaff wrote:

> For example, I (want to) use only ruby19:
>
> #grep RUBY /etc/portage/make.conf RUBY_TARGETS="ruby19"

Yes, in hindsight I think that should have been the current default since
ruby19 has the best overall coverage for packages. Once ruby20 has caught
up I think we'll move to a default of RUBY_TARGETS="ruby20"

> In spite of that, portage often insists on installing other versions of
> ruby, rdoc, rubygems, and you already know the others.

Partially this was because we tried to solve another issue when ruby20
went stable. I removed those forced use flags for ruby20 last week, so
this should no longer happen. We still need to come up with a good plan
when the same issue will pop up for ruby21.

> AFAICT, the other versions of ruby are dragged in by old ruby packages
> that were installed before I started using "RUBY_TARGETS" (because I
> didn't yet know about RUBY_TARGETS),

Yes, these will still have other ruby targets recorded and thus also
request them for their dependencies. emerge --newuse should be able to
help here.

> I discovered all of this by grepping for ruby in /var/db/pkg but it took
> me a long time to get it sorted out, and I don't expect that a gentoo
> beginner could do it.  (OTOH maybe a gentoo beginner wouldn't care about
> installing multiple ruby versions :)

We try to keep the default settings so that someone who doesn't care or
know about ruby should get a good experience. Moving from ruby18 to ruby19
we did some things that could have been handled better (such as not
mentioning that the new ruby must be eselected before making the switch),
so hopefully we've learned from those when we do the next update.

Hans