Re: [gentoo-dev] Abusing PROVIDE

[Martin Schlemmer]

On Wed, 2003-05-21 at 12:10, Tom Payne wrote:
> Hi --
>
> I'd like to abuse PROVIDE. Here's the story:
>
> ruby-1.6.8 is the latest version of Ruby
> rexml, yaml, optparse, and others are available as add-on packages
>
> ruby-1.8.0 is coming Real Soon Now
> rexml, yaml, optparse, and others are part of the ruby-1.8.0 distribution
>
> If a package needs ruby and optparse I can write
> DEPEND="( >=dev-lang/ruby-1.6 <dev-lang/ruby-1.8 dev-ruby/optparse )
> 	|| >=dev-lang/ruby-1.8.0"
> but this means that I have to modify every ebuild that depends on any of
> packages that are now part of ruby-1.8.
>
> Question: is it OK to make dev-lang/ruby-1.8 PROVIDE rexml, yaml, etc.? e.g.
> PROVIDE="dev-ruby/rexml dev-ruby/yaml dev-ruby/optparse"
> Or will this cause problems?
>

It may not be considered 100% correct.  More technically correct would
be:

PROVIDE="virtual/ruby-rexml virtual/ruby-yaml virtual/ruby-optparse"

A few things however do provide similar to what you want, so maybe
we should check with Nick/Daniel first.

You should also remember that if it is a virtual (of whatever form), you
will run into issues if you want to depend on specific versions ...


Any reason not to keep 1.8.0 in testing for a bit, with whatever depends
on it, and just specifying DEPEND as:

DEPEND=">=dev-lang/ruby-1.8"

?  Then you can when they get marked stable just faze out the old ruby
totally ...


Regards,

-- 

Martin Schlemmer
Gentoo Linux Developer, Desktop/System Team Developer
Cape Town, South Africa