[gentoo-dev] Re: [RFC] Policy for migrating library consumers to subslots

[Martin Vaeth]

Kent Fredric <kentfredric@×××××.com> wrote:
>
>> this dependency will install for a user with unstable keywords
>>
>
> That, in itself, indicates the user is usually OK with "new versions of
> things" ;)

You are intentionally confusing "new version" (AKA upgrade) with
_additional_ installation of a package, just because that package
contains a newer version.

If you explicitly installed that package, an upgrade of course
is desired, but *hard depending* on a package just because it
provides a newer version of a bundled package is more than
questionable:

Would you think that it is correct if e.g. a multimedia package
which *forcibly* has bundled ffmpeg should in addition *forcibly*
depend on the system ffmpeg library (for no other reason than
it is bundled anyway)? According to your definition of
"always guarantee to install new version" this would have to
be the case.

I agree that no solution is completely satisfactory:
The most correct solution might be to unbundle the library -
which for perl would mean to *not* install the provided
modules but put all of them in perl-core. But as often,
unbundling is here a *very* hard job (how to solve the
chicken-and-egg problem of installing perl packages
without having packages available for installation)
and probably manpower is missing to do this for every
perl version...

But in fact, this solution would allow complete
elimination of all artificial workarounds by
virtuals, eclasses or USE-flags and circumvent the problem
of duplicate installation of packages completely.