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On Thu, 2 Mar 2006 21:29:30 +0100 Grobian <grobian@g.o> wrote: |
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| On 02-03-2006 20:19:19 +0000, Ciaran McCreesh wrote: |
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| > On Thu, 2 Mar 2006 21:10:02 +0100 Paul de Vrieze <pauldv@g.o> |
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| > wrote: |
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| > | I'm also convinced that deliberate circumvention is easy to |
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| > | detect. |
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| > |
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| > In that case, please provide a list of cases where !arch? flags are |
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| > being used to circumvent repoman warnings, where the correct |
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| > solution |
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| |
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| Circumvent? Can you elaborate on that? repoman does have a problem |
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| with this, while portage does not. |
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|
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Okay. This is a rather hypothetical example, since alsa is masked on |
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relevant profiles, but it's a nice, easy to understand case that's on a |
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worryingly common theme. |
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|
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Say you create a new package, which we'll call mysoundthing. You add |
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mysoundthing 1.1 to the tree, and it picks up a ~sparc keyword. Along |
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comes mysoundthing 1.2, complete with optional ALSA support. You add in |
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a dep of alsa? ( whatever the alsa libraries are these days ), and try |
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to commit it. Repoman complains that the alsa libraries are unkeyworded |
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on sparc. |
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|
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Now, you've heard that dropping keywords is bad. But you have a clever |
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idea, and make the dep alsa? ( !sparc? ( alsa libraries ) ). This gets |
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past repoman just fine. |
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|
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Along comes 2006 (or late 2005), and some sparc profiles get working |
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ALSA support. So, the ALSA libraries are keyworded / profile masked as |
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appropriate. Along comes joeuser, who installs mysoundthing. He wants |
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ALSA support, so he turns on the alsa USE flag. Sure enough, emerge -pv |
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indicates that ALSA will be enabled. |
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|
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However... Because of the nasty !arch? hack, he won't get alsa support |
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until the arch team goes through and fixes this ebuild (and probably |
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several others too...). |
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|
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The correct solution is to get the alsa USE flag use.masked on various |
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profiles (as, in the alsa case, it is). However, there are a whooole |
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load of ebuilds in the tree that don't do this properly. |
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|
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Scary sidenote: a similar hack has lead to some forums users suggesting |
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that the way to avoid getting mozilla as part of gnome was to use |
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USE="mips". |
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|
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This issue has been a major pain in the ass for some of the arch teams, |
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and it will very likely be another major pain in the ass in the future, |
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again and again. |
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|
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-- |
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Ciaran McCreesh : Gentoo Developer (Wearer of the shiny hat) |
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Mail : ciaranm at gentoo.org |
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Web : http://dev.gentoo.org/~ciaranm |
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