>>>>> On Sun, 5 Dec 2010, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:

> That whole section was written before Portage got parallel jobs
> support, and was based around what ebuilds were actually doing.
> Portage's parallel jobs break those rules, and this has caused all
> kinds of weirdness.

> The implications are *supposed* to be that if you want to do parallel
> builds, you build binary packages in parallel (being sure to only run
> one lot of pkg_ functions at once), and then install those binary
> packages (the usual way, so rerunning pkg_setup) serially.

> Instead, Portage just installs directly, and has a whole load of
> convoluted hacks to try to avoid breakage. These don't actually work,
> but the bugs are hidden often enough that you can often go for quite a
> long time before you end up screwing your system up... In particular,
> Portage assumes that if a and b aren't in any way dependent upon each
> other, then they're not going to do anything to / that's going to break
> the other one, which isn't true.

Thank you for your quick response, but this doesn't answer my
questions:

>> Why is the second item needed? Changes to DISTDIR don't alter other
>> packages, so aren't they covered by the first item anyway? Or do I
>> misunderstand the first item's first sentence?

>> Which of the following examples count as "variancy"?
>>  - Calling enewuser() in pkg_setup,
>>  - Removing orphan files in pkg_setup,
>>  - Calling pkg_pretend.

Ulrich