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

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

Marc Joliet <marcec@gmx.de> wrote:
>
> One of those questions stands out to me right now: the one on understandable
> error messages. As some recent posts to this ML demonstrate, it seems to
> be one area where portage is visibly falling (staying?) behind right now.
> They remind me of the type of error message gcc/g++ spit out, actually.

In both cases, it is technically very cumbersome to get good
error messages. In fact, it would need alone more work in programming
than to do the actual job (and it would slow down execution time
drastically even if no errors arise).

Concerning portage, the situation is apparently this
(I am guessing this only from the outputs which are posted):

When portage detects that it cannot resolve something after
backtracking, it dies. Then all non-resolved conflicts are
spit out - often these are some that *could* be resolved.
So instead of dying, portage would need to try to continue
to resolve anyway partially as far as it could and only then
die. This would mean that branches cannot be cut, so the runtime
would probably increase tremendously. Moreover, the result might
be even more confusing if there is some strange branch in which
slightly more resolving is possible.