[gentoo-dev] Re: Re: [RFC] PROPERTIES=set for meta-packages that should behave like package sets

[Steve Long]

Zac Medico wrote:

> Steve Long wrote:
>> Zac Medico wrote:
>>> Rémi Cardona wrote:
>>>> As one of the maintainers of the gnome-base/gnome meta, I fail to see
>>>> the usefulness of such a change. We have yet to ask users to rebuild
>>>> "gnome" completely. Do you have any specific use cases (maybe coming
>>>> from the KDE herd, since you used the kde meta as an example) ?
>>>>
>>> Over the course of the discussion I've revised the idea so that it
>>> essentially represents a way to define a package set, without any
>>> changes to existing behavior. What will change is that we will have
>>> a new way to define package sets, based on ebuilds.
>>
>> Makes sense to me, though not sure you need the mapping file. I'm
>> perfectly happy about emerge -uDN @kde-meta say, updating all kde-meta
>> packages I might have installed; I take it that after emerge kde-meta to
>> install, and then removing some of the packages, the user could continue
>> to reference the set for upgrade, without portage reinstalling those?
>
> That would be a set subtraction operation, so the user would use a
> configuration file to configure the set so that certain unwanted
> atoms are automatically subtracted out. Alternatively, we could
> implement a syntax extension for "optional atoms" that are only
> pulled into the dependency graph if they happen to be installed already.
>
It would be nice to address it; wrt people installing a meta which will
define a set, it'd make it easier to maintain (a box) if the set syntax
referred to whatever was installed, whereas emerging the package would
install all its deps as a standard virtual does (in the default setting.)

Integrating seems like a good idea, wrt to the USE settings you discussed in
the other thread. There is already a framework in place to model all that,
and more, so might as well use it. (I'd vote for allowing as much
flexibility as the ebuild author wants to specify.)