[gentoo-portage-dev] Question about PDEPEND

[Pacho Ramos]

Hello

During today's review session with Petteri (due bug #284528) PDEPEND
question appeared about what really does it. I replied that it contains
dependencies that need to be installed after the package (as is shown in
http://devmanual.gentoo.org/general-concepts/dependencies/index.html )
but he told me that PDEPEND is really the same as RDEPEND with cycle
breaking. He also suggested me to ask portage devs about what it really
doing PDEPEND.

Now, after the session, I rechecked devmanual page and noticed that
"after" is in cursive (sorry for didn't noticing it before), also
googled a bit and found posts like:
http://blog.flameeyes.eu/2008/10/18/blurring-the-separation-between-rdepend-and-pdepend
http://help.lockergnome.com/linux/gentoo-dev-PDEPEND-behaviour--ftopict483842.html

that clearly show PDEPEND is not simply "merge depends after the
package".

Then, if possible, I would highly appreciate a summary about what really
does PDEPEND. Of course, as I know portage devs are overloaded, if you
don't have time to reply, no problem at all :-)

Thanks a lot