On 13/03/12 02:23, Neil Bothwick wrote:

On Tue, 13 Mar 2012 01:54:30 +0200, Nikos Chantziaras wrote:


Anyone care to offer an opinion on what it will take to get PROVIDES
support in portage?


IMO, it would take virtuals causing so many headachy breakages that
some devs started keeping up a steady drumbeat on irc and mailing
lists. When the number of virtual packages gets close to a thousand,
I'd guess that might happen. Then there would be years of discussion
and GLEP proposals, and by EAPI 207 it should be done.


The problem isn't the amount of virtuals. This doesn't affect the
users much. It's the inability for people to offer replacement
packages in overlays.


They could include a modified virtual in the overlay, but your point is
valid; including the information in the ebuilds is more flexible.


This only works if portage has a virtual. If it doesn't, you're
screwed. You need to also provide modified packages of all ebuilds
depending on the package you're offering a replacement for. As you can
guess, it's not practical.


This leaves only one option; have users put the original package in
package.provided and emerge your replacement as a non-dep (going in
"world".)

On Tue, 13 Mar 2012 01:54:30 +0200
Nikos Chantziaras <realnc@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 13/03/12 00:34, »Q« wrote:
> > On Mon, 12 Mar 2012 22:29:10 +0200
> > Alan McKinnon<alan.mckinnon@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Anyone care to offer an opinion on what it will take to get
> >> PROVIDES support in portage?
> >
> > IMO, it would take virtuals causing so many headachy breakages that
> > some devs started keeping up a steady drumbeat on irc and mailing
> > lists. When the number of virtual packages gets close to a
> > thousand, I'd guess that might happen. Then there would be years
> > of discussion and GLEP proposals, and by EAPI 207 it should be
> > done.
>
> The problem isn't the amount of virtuals. This doesn't affect the
> users much.

I expect more virtuals will mean more bugs affecting users. I don't
know how hairy they will be, but here's one ugly example:
<https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=398295>. It's unresolved, but
less has been added back to @system so stage 3 tarballs aren't broken
for now. (I guess this could have happened with provides as well.)

> It's the inability for people to offer replacement
> packages in overlays.

Yeah, I see.