Re: [gentoo-soc] New idea: auto dependency builder.

[Rich Freeman]

On Mon, Mar 21, 2011 at 4:59 AM, Fabian Groffen <grobian@g.o> wrote:
>> > - have you looked into the preseved-libs feature of Portage-2.2? you may
>> >  want to at least refer to it in your proposal
>> Yes, I met with it from the user's side.
>
> Improve your proposal, and just add a single sentence (or two) on it,
> with your statement below.
>
>> For example, when I install a
>> new linux kernel, I need to recompile virtualbox-modules, when I
>> update perl of python, I need to recompile all perl or python modules
>> manually.

I think the biggest impact of identifying dependencies is discovering
when they're missing entirely.

There are many libraries that are commonly installed but aren't
strictly part of the system set.  An ebuild might get into the wild
that misses a dependency on one of these libraries but not be caught
in testing, since it doesn't break most of the time.  Maybe it depends
on something that depends on the library, which means that it will
work until the day that the dependent package's dependencies change.

This is probably something likely to start a bit of a war and need not
be settled now, but if dependencies can be automatically managed, then
perhaps it would even make sense to make all dependencies explicit
(including those in the system set).  Not really relevant to the
proposal and probably a discussion for another time once it isn't a
moot point.

Rich