On Sun, Dec 26, 2010 at 05:33:06PM +0200, Petteri RRRty wrote:
> > There's still that stupid !virtual/blah thing to deal with. Old style
> > virtual providers are allowed to block their own virtual to mean "there
> > must not be any other provider of this installed" (although it's not
> > clear what that means if anything other than a simple !virtual/pkg is
> > used). Anything doing that would now have to explicitly list its own
> > blocks. Arguably, this is a good thing, since you'd have to say exactly
> > what you do and don't work with.
> > 
> 
> The cases where this is needed could declare the full list of providers
> in an eclass. Are there any problems with this approach besides the
> increased maintenance burden?

Overlay interaction, and the need to bundle a g37 metapkg, allowing it 
to get out of date.  Adding an "exacly one of" dep spec would be useful 
for maintainers also I suspect, and easier on the manager in terms of 
processing- it's not required, but advisable in my opinion.

I'm not a fan of old style virtuals, but it also has some benefits 
over metapkgs- ease of self blocking is one example, ease of extension 
also.  There is an additional benefit- it leaves blocking to the 
provider.  An example would be a provider that unlike all of the 
others, can't coexist with them- hasn't been rewritten to eselect or 
something equivalent.

It might be worth seeing if there is a new form of the decentralized 
virtuals we could add w/out the baggage inherited in old style, rather 
than just chucking it out in full.  Just a thought.

Meanwhile, current old style virtuals still specified in the profiles 
follow-

virtual/alsa
virtual/antivirus
virtual/aspell-dict
virtual/baselayout
virtual/blackbox
virtual/bootloader
virtual/cron
virtual/dev-manager
virtual/dhcpc
virtual/dhcpcd
virtual/fam
virtual/gzip
virtual/imap-c-client
virtual/imapUW
virtual/imapd
virtual/inetd
virtual/j2ee
virtual/jabber-server
virtual/krb5
virtual/libc
virtual/libiconv
virtual/libpcap
virtual/linux-sources
virtual/logger
virtual/lpr
virtual/m3
virtual/mailx
virtual/man
virtual/mda
virtual/modutils
virtual/mta
virtual/ooo
virtual/opengl
virtual/os-headers
virtual/pam
virtual/pbs
virtual/php
virtual/portage
virtual/python
virtual/quicktime
virtual/ruby
virtual/skkserv
virtual/squeak-image
virtual/ssh
virtual/tftp
virtual/utempter
virtual/w3m
virtual/wine

Of those, libiconv and opengl have a g37 metapkg.

~harring