Re: [gentoo-dev] [RFC] PROPERTIES=set for meta-packages that should behave like package sets

[Marius Mauch]

On Sat, 27 Sep 2008 17:21:18 -0700
Zac Medico <zmedico@g.o> wrote:

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> Hi everyone,
>
> Please consider a PROPERTIES=set value that allows an ebuild to
> indicate that it should behave like a package set when selected on
> the command line. This is behavior is somewhat difficult to describe
> in words but the following example should be sufficient to convey
> the general idea. Consider a case where all of the kde-base/*-meta
> packages exhibit the "set" property, and these packages and their
> dependencies are currently installed. In such a case, the default
> behavior for a command such as `emerge kde-base/kde-meta` should be
> to reinstall the the selected kde-base/kde-meta ebuild and the set
> of packages which includes it's direct dependencies and it's
> recursive "set" dependencies. So, assuming that all USE flags are
> enabled for the selected kde-base/kde-meta ebuild, it would
> reinstall the direct dependencies of kdeartwork-meta, kdebase-meta,
> kdeedu-meta, kdegames-meta, kdegraphics-meta, kdemultimedia-meta,
> kdenetwork-meta, kdetoys-meta, kdeutils-meta, and
> kdeaccessibility-meta ebuilds. Similarly, the default behavior for a
> command such as `emerge --unmerge kde-base/kde-meta` would be to
> uninstall the same set of packages.

I'm not convinced that this is a good idea if some packages suddenly
behave _vastly_ different than others (from a users POV) without any
clear indication (a -meta somewhere in the name IMO doesn't count).

Maybe we can just create a PackageSet class that wraps a package though
to get the same behavior while keeping the two behaviors separated by
syntax.

Marius

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