Re: [gentoo-dev] minimalistic emerge

[Ian Stakenvicius]

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On 08/08/14 03:34 PM, Peter Stuge wrote:
> Kent Fredric wrote:
>> dependencies are forward specifications from upstream telling us
>> what their software needs to function properly.
>
> Unfortunately that's not the full story. :\
>
> ebuilds often (for me) have artificial dependencies, when the
> actual version required is too old to be in the tree, but maybe not
> too old to be installed on an existing system.
>
> I think it's bad policy to lie about dependencies in ebuilds for
> the sole reason of only ever depending on versions which actually
> exist in the same snapshot. It's a too simplistic model of
> reality.
>

For the most part I don't think that happens very often; usually if
all stable versions of a dependency can satisfy a package's needs then
there isn't any minimum version specification (or the minimum version
specification hasn't actually been updated in an ebuild's *DEPEND,
despite the older versions having been removed).

The main exception to this is the work done related to gx86-multilib
(as for obvious reasons the multilib ebuilds are needed to supply
multilib dependencies), and the refactoring that mgorny did a few
weeks back to fix the EAPI<5 USE_EXPAND+IUSE_IMPLICIT undefined
behaviour issue.

That said, even if dependency atoms allow the older, no-longer-in-tree
versions to satisfy a package's needs, as I said earlier I don't think
any dev has the time and resources to test against anything older than
latest-stable, and definitely not anything that's no longer in the tree.


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