[gentoo-user] Re: do subslots improve user-experience?

[Martin Vaeth <vaeth@mathematik.uni-wuerzburg.de>]

Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> You don't have to keep explaining subslots to me

But not every reader knows the details - this is not a private
conversation.

> What I have maintained all along is that I don't see the solution as
> tested to be production-ready

It has been in ~arch for many months, and now it is becoming stable.
This is how testing works in gentoo.
As I tried to explain, even if devs do it wrong, there is not much
harm which can happen except for useless rebuilds or that the
advantage of subslots is missed by mistake.

In practice, it turns out that the portage error messages tend to
confuse users more now: The reason being that, although portage
would be able to resolve subslot dependencies automatically,
it does not show the resolved ones if it breaks before because of
an error, and so users see a lot of errors which actually are none
but occur only as a side effect of a completely different problem.
Although this behavior of portage happens not only for subslots,
the number of "false positives" has increased due to subslots.
This leads to the wrong perceiption which one can see in the forums.
  But misleading error messages due to non-finished resolving
were a problem which existed also before in portage and which
should be attacked anyway, if it can be.