| 1 |
Hello everyone, |
| 2 |
|
| 3 |
I'm sure at least half of you are thinking "Oh no, not this again...", |
| 4 |
and I agree. However, I'm /also/ thinking "Why the heck haven't we |
| 5 |
done this yet?" |
| 6 |
|
| 7 |
We've been discussing this since 2008, and probably waaay before that |
| 8 |
too. The entire discussion about whether we should do this or not has |
| 9 |
already passed, there is NO NEED to have that again. This email is |
| 10 |
about discussion on what all is *left* before we can do $SUBJECT. |
| 11 |
|
| 12 |
What prompted this email? libpng-1.4 and many other upgrades that have |
| 13 |
left gentoo systems very very broken. We have to resort to random |
| 14 |
scripts to fix breakage, which reflects very badly on us. Even worse, |
| 15 |
a lot of users just give up and reinstall their system, or don't |
| 16 |
upgrade, or just move away from Gentoo. |
| 17 |
|
| 18 |
I understand that these kind of breakages are inevitable, but with |
| 19 |
as-needed, we can reduce their effect *drastically*. Instead of having |
| 20 |
to rebuild almost their entire system, the user would only need to |
| 21 |
rebuild packages that directly link(ed) to libpng. I honestly think |
| 22 |
that we cannot afford to expose our users to any more such upgrades |
| 23 |
without as-needed in the default linux profile. |
| 24 |
|
| 25 |
There's a tracker bug for this, and the problems still remaining are: |
| 26 |
http://bugs.gentoo.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=129413&hide_resolved=1 |
| 27 |
|
| 28 |
*Most* of the problems listed there are forced-as-needed problems, |
| 29 |
which need to be fixed no doubt, but should NOT block addition of |
| 30 |
--as-needed to LDFLAGS in make.defaults which will not trigger those |
| 31 |
build failures. |
| 32 |
|
| 33 |
What needs to be done now is for someone with lots of CPU power to |
| 34 |
grab the list of packages[1], and build them one-by-one (all |
| 35 |
versions), adding to a new list all the ebuilds that fail. How to |
| 36 |
test: |
| 37 |
|
| 38 |
LDFLAGS="-Wl,--as-needed" emerge -v1 $atom |
| 39 |
|
| 40 |
Once we have the list that fails with normal as-needed, we can fix |
| 41 |
them, get the fix upstreamed (if possible), and switch the flag on. |
| 42 |
This action should probably be accompanied by a news item informing |
| 43 |
users about the change, and encouraging them to report the (rare) bug |
| 44 |
which might hit them. |
| 45 |
|
| 46 |
Let's try to make Gentoo less frustrating for our users. |
| 47 |
|
| 48 |
1. http://dev.gentoo.org/~nirbheek/files/as-needed-failures.list |
| 49 |
-- |
| 50 |
~Nirbheek Chauhan |
| 51 |
|
| 52 |
Gentoo GNOME+Mozilla Team |
Archives