On Wednesday 06 August 2008 07:37:26 Joe Peterson wrote:
> You are trying to say it's a 'live' ebuild (i.e. it gets the sources from a
> live source) - that's all.  The locking issues are a technical detail

No, the locking issues are the whole point.  There are other reasons to want 
the package manager know that an ebuild is live, yes, but they're fairly 
independent of the locking and so should be indicated separately.

Consider what happens if/when we move the scm eclasses to do their own 
locking, for example: the ebuilds using them are still "live", but the 
mutually-exclusive unpack behaviour on the package manager side is no longer 
necessary or desirable.  We can't just drop the behaviour from the package 
manager entirely at that point, because not all the eclasses will necessarily 
be updated at the same time (especially ones in overlays).

On the other hand, people sometimes use the scm eclasses to fetch a particular 
revision, rather than "the latest".  Ebuilds doing this still need the 
special parallelism handling, but they shouldn't be handled as "live" in 
other ways (such as automatic periodic rebuilds).