Stuart Longland posted on Sun, 26 Jun 2011 22:27:40 +1000 as excerpted:

> On 06/26/11 15:44, Benedikt Böhm wrote:
>> On Sun, Jun 26, 2011 at 4:59 AM, Stuart Longland <redhatter@g.o>
>> wrote:
>>> - revdep-rebuild (handles packages broken by soname changes, etc)
>> 
>> solved by preserved-libs in portage-2.2
> 
> Hmmm, except that portage-2.2 isn't stable yet... indeed it isn't even
> out of alpha yet.  Not going to unleash that on my production systems.

Besides portage-2.2 still being unstable, preserved-libs "solves" the 
problem by keeping outdated, buggy and potentially security compromised 
libraries around.  Further, it does so by artificially attaching old 
versions of various shared-object binaries to the new packages, thus 
producing a non-repeatable-build package, since what old versions get 
attached varies depending on what old versions were installed at the time.

With obvious exceptions for the toolchain deps necessary to get out of 
the hole in the first place (which should in this view be kept to an 
absolute minimum), for some, that so-called "solution" is more broken 
than the problem it's trying to solve.  For the people for whom it's a 
solution, great, it's a marvelous technical achievement I'm not 
detracting from, but for others, it's just a bigger problem.

revdep-rebuild OTOH, has a more straightforward approach, simply 
detecting binaries that depended on now-absent libs and rebuilding them 
to depend on what's currently available instead.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman