Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] Splitting dev-lang/python into per-slot packages, starting with 3.14

["Michał Górny" <mgorny@gentoo.org>]

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On Sat, 2024-10-12 at 11:59 +0200, Ulrich Mueller wrote:
> > > > > > On Sat, 12 Oct 2024, Michał Górny wrote:
> 
> > However, I think the cleanest way forward would be to stop slotting
> > CPython like this, and instead have a separate package for each version,
> > just like the vast majority of distributions do, i.e.:
> 
> >   dev-lang/python3_N
> 
> That other distributions do it that way is not an argument because most
> other distributions don't have slots.
> 
> > This naturally means that only the specific version requested (e.g. via
> > targets) would be installed, and no cross-slot autoupgrades would
> > happen.  Ideally, I'd like to start doing that with Python 3.14 whose
> > first alpha is expected next week.  Depending on how they handle
> > freethreading, we'd end up having the first or both of:
> 
> >   dev-lang/python3_14
> >   dev-lang/python3_14t
> 
> IMHO this would abuse the package name for information that absolutely
> doesn't belong there. It belongs in PV or SLOT.
> 
> To me it seems that you try to work around a problem (greedy upgrade
> behaviour) that should really be solved in the package manager.

In my opinion, it's the other way around.  We have slots, that are a fit
solution for packages that are roughly compatible between every major
release, and we keep abusing them for every single thing we can bend
enough to make it fit.

Greedy upgrade behavior makes sense when you have packages where :=
and :* operators are applicable.  It doesn't make sense when every
single dependency is expected to specify an explicit slot.  In fact,
when you are never supposed to depend on the package without specifying
a slot, why would you think slots are the right solution?

In fact, the "freethreading" variation already implies that there could
be more than one "slot" per package version.

It's as meaningless as having sqlite3 packaged as sqlite:3, or gtk that
is now randomly split between gtk+:2, gtk+:3 and gtk:4.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny


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