Re: [gentoo-dev] About forcing rebuilds of other packages issue

[Zac Medico]

On 06/06/2012 01:28 AM, Pacho Ramos wrote:
> El mar, 05-06-2012 a las 16:07 -0700, Zac Medico escribió:
>> The "SLOT operator" dependencies that Ciaran has been advocating are
>> very close to a good solution. However, if we want it to work with
>> unslotted packages, then we need to introduce a separate ABI_SLOT
>> variable as discussed here:
>>
>>   https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=192319#c18
>>
>> It's really no more difficult to do than "SLOT operator" dependencies,
>> it's more flexible, and we can do it in EAPI 5.
>
> In that case, I obviously wouldn't have any problem with that approach
> (it sound even better :)). Is there any place where I could get a bit
> more documentation about how this "SLOT operator" way would work? For
> example, how would work for rebuilding x11 drivers after updating xorg
> or rebuilding gobject-introspection after major glib update...

Whenever you have an ABI change, the developer doing the version bump
needs to increment the SLOT (or ABI_SLOT if we use a separate variable)
in the package. Packages that depend on the package with the ABI change
(reverse dependencies) append a := operator to their dependency atoms,
indicating that they are locked to the ABI of the SLOT that they are
built against. The package manager translates the := operators into a
dependencies on specific SLOTs at build time, so that when you update
your system next time, it can use this information to trigger rebuilds
automatically when necessary.
-- 
Thanks,
Zac