Re: [gentoo-dev] Help offered - Portage tree

[Chris Gianelloni]

On Thu, 2008-03-13 at 10:15 -0400, Caleb Tennis wrote:
> > +1 on that and if people who use binary pkgs don't tell us what breaks,
> > we won't know.
>
> The binpkg format needs some way to store the actual versions of the dependencies as
> they were on the machine the package was compiled on.  Then, when emerging the
> binpkg, someway to force those dependencies on the new install machine would be
> nice.

Please... God... no...

> I use this example because it's actually hit me before, but it extends to lots of
> other scenarios.  The obvious fix is to either use --deep, or just make sure you
> need machine 2 up to date with machine 1, though that's difficult to do when you're
> talking about machine 301 and machine 559.

As much as I hate to say it, your example was rather bunk, because
openssl changed SONAME during that time.  Keeping the package
information isn't *nearly* as important and doing some checking on the
package.  It sounds more like we need to keep some additional
information around, so checks on things like NEEDED can be done.
Perhaps some new "LIBRARIES" file which lists libraries installed by the
package.  Then, prior to merge, $package_manager could check NEEDED
versus RDEPEND versus LIBRARIES and bail if something's not
right/missing.  In this case, even if the RDEPEND was
>=dev-libs/openssl-0.9.7 and you have 0.9.8, it would fail because
NEEDED would list libssl.so.0.9.7, but LIBRARIES would only have
libssl.so.0.9.8 in it.

> If there was a way to tell the bin package installer to make sure you met all of the
> same minimum verisons of the deps as they were on the original compiling machine,
> that would be fantastic.

Uhh... >= in RDEPEND does that, already... Also, this wouldn't have
resolved your openssl issue, at all.  Your machine scenario above would
have still failed, since the minimum version was 0.9.7 on your build
host.

> Now, I'm happy to file a bug and assign it (to the portage team?), but I view this
> really as a wishlist item, and since admittedly very few devs use the binpkg stuff,
> I didn't see it as something that would probably get acted upon anyway.  I'm not
> complaining about that either, just merely stating a fact.

Well, I sincerely hope that you do not file such a bug, as it would
royally screw over the one team in Gentoo that *does* consistently use
our binary package support.

I would definitely like to see the support improved, but not at the
expense of doing very stupid things like locking to specific
versions/revisions of packages.  No offense, but that screams of RPM
hell.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Games Developer