Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Rich Freeman <rich0@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev <gentoo-dev@l.g.o>
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Implicit system dependency
Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2014 14:17:08
Message-Id: CAGfcS_n6j7i3H83L4W+Y9YuA33YrriZpGa6vwWD2JN2vFgDY9A@mail.gmail.com
In Reply to: [gentoo-dev] Re: Implicit system dependency by Michael Palimaka
1 On Thu, Nov 13, 2014 at 5:30 AM, Michael Palimaka <kensington@g.o> wrote:
2 >
3 > In general, a package must explicitly depend upon what it directly uses.
4 > However, to avoid ebuild complexity and developer burden there are some
5 > exceptions. Packages that appear in the base system set may be omitted
6 > from an ebuild's dependency list in the following circumstances:
7 >
8
9 So, I'm not a big fan of implicit dependencies in general. What does
10 the new policy buy us that the existing one does not? Why not try to
11 find a way to ditch implicit dependencies entirely? If the issue is
12 that nobody wants to have a laundry list of dependencies in every
13 package, why not use something like a virtual to pull in all the
14 commonly-used stuff. Then for the 0.1% of the tree where it matters
15 we could list things explicitly so that we don't have a big pile of
16 packages that portage can't parallelize.
17
18 It seems like the problems with the current approach are:
19 1. @system can vary by profile, which allows bugs to creep in since
20 maintainers can't stay on top of what is and isn't always in @system).
21 2. PMs can't build @system packages in parallel, since it doesn't
22 know what the real deps are.
23 3. The way we use @system makes it hard to tell if it is safe to
24 remove some package which is otherwise heavily-used. You never really
25 know if you can safely do without bash, and so on. (Note, this bit
26 wouldn't be helped at all by simply turning system into a big
27 virtual.)
28
29 I'm not entirely sure what problem you're trying to solve, so the
30 above may or may not be helpful. I'm fine with incremental
31 improvements if they actually improve something. Otherwise, the
32 status quo does have the benefit of simplicity - you don't have to
33 list @system packages as dependencies ever, but you can do so if you
34 wish or it brings some benefit (deps on specific versions/slots,
35 slot-operator deps, etc).
36
37 --
38 Rich

Replies

Subject Author
[gentoo-dev] Re: Implicit system dependency Michael Palimaka <kensington@g.o>