On Thu, Oct 25, 2001 at 07:12:20AM +0200, Dan Armak wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> This looks really great :-). 
> 
> One note: what about conflicting/incompatible packages? Will/should we have a 
> syntax for saying, this package must not be installed?
> Is that what happens when I say !foo[...] (as distinct from foo[!...])?

I am working on that problem just now. I do not really want the ebuilds to
be the (only?) place to specify that. Reason is as follows:
1) We add package foo-1.0 on Monday
2) We add package bar-1.0 on Tuesday, which we know conflicts with foo.
   At this point, we will have to update all foo ebuilds to tell Portage
   that foo cannot coexist with bar.

I think we should have packages.conflict or somesuch alongside
packages.mask, and that all specification of conflicts should be handled
there. Otherwise, Portage would have to parse *all* ebuilds whenever it
tried to calculate dependencies (or all conflicts would have to be updated
in all mutually conflicting ebuilds whenever a new ebuild enters the tree,
and that is butt ugly).


Kind regards,

Karl T