[gentoo-user] Re: Prevent depclean from removing Python-2.6?

[Grant Edwards <grant.b.edwards@gmail.com>]

On 2011-05-10, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:
> Apparently, though unproven, at 17:13 on Tuesday 10 May 2011, Grant Edwards 
> did opine thusly:
>
>> > I think the issue happens because portage does not take eselect
>> > choices into account when building it's dep graph, it only uses the
>> > DEPENDS in ebuilds.
>> 
>> Apparently so.  It seems like it ought to pay attention to eselect. 
>> If I've explicitly configured my system to use 2.6 instead of 2.7,
>> removing 2.6 doesn't seem like a good thing...
>
> There's one more wrinkle though:
>
> portage, ebuilds and EAPI are all portable to other systems (funtoo etc) 
> whereas eselect is very gentoo-specific.

Ah.  I didn't realise that eselect was gentoo-specific.

> So putting gentooism support into portage would be
> counter-productive.
>
> A real solution would require some kind of generic statement in
> ebuilds that would allow for optional dependencies. I haven't thought
> this completely through, but maybe something like the following:
>
> - A new keyword in ebuilds to indicate packages with soft deps
> - A new file format that lists these deps currently in use
> - Tools like eselect could update this file as they adjust user preferences
>
> This way, portage would have additional info available about unusual
> packages still in use when --depclean runs.

Perhaps having eselect add currently selected slots to the world file
would be sufficient?

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