> Portage really needs to know this anyway to be able to sort out possible 
> breakage when things are upgraded. Sure, everything can be scanned but that 
> is very time-consuming and thus a PITA for the end-user.
> 
> Remember that the packages, once installed, are always binary and any change 
> to versions are just as likely to cause breakage within the installed system 
> regardless of how the new packages are installed.
> 
> Regards,
> Jason Stubbs

This just as good a time as any time to bring this up:

The portage tree is getting larger and there is already talk about
making portage support download on demand... or something like that.

Why not express the dependency as an RDF graph? A dependency statement
would be a complete uri. This would also remove the need to maintain a
single package namespace.

-John