Gentoo Archives: gentoo-dev

From: Mart Raudsepp <leio@g.o>
To: gentoo-dev@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: language bindings as separate packages
Date: Thu, 01 May 2008 16:05:44
Message-Id: 1209657935.13974.10.camel@localhost
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: language bindings as separate packages by "Santiago M. Mola"
1 On N, 2008-05-01 at 17:52 +0200, Santiago M. Mola wrote:
2 > On Thu, May 1, 2008 at 5:09 PM, Enrico Weigelt <weigelt@×××××.de> wrote:
3 > >
4 > > Hi folks,
5 > >
6 > > while building yum, I again ran into trouble because one
7 > > dependency has to be rebuilt with an specific useflag first
8 > > (in this case it was libxml2 + python useflag). Actually,
9 > > there are *lots* of these cases and (AFAIK) portage has no
10 > > way for properly handling this - it's up to the individual
11 > > ebuilds to check for those situations and artifically breaking
12 > > the build. Of coure, breaking builds are ugly.
13 >
14 > The proper solution for these cases is implementing USE dependencies,
15 > which would obsolete pkg_setup checks, and would provide portage with
16 > info about which USE flags are needed for each dependency. This
17 > feature is already implemented in other package managers (it's in
18 > Paludis, maybe in pkgcore too?) and I think we all look forward its
19 > inclusion in portage.
20
21 I do not see that as a solution, but instead maybe only a fix for the
22 fact that it's failing at some point in an emerge run instead of knowing
23 beforehand.
24 It still means a rebuild of the binding providing library, which
25 involves unnecessary recompilation of the (typically) C or C++ library,
26 which in some cases can be a huge time sink - that in the case that the
27 library in question isn't at that time pulled in (in that case the
28 package manager can enable it at first merge), but already installed
29 without the bindings USE flags.
30
31 So splitting packages is the perfect solution in my opinion, given
32 unlimited maintainer time and such. In real world that might be too hard
33 to maintain if upstream doesn't go along, but not in all cases (depends
34 on how much time the maintainer has, how complex the build system is,
35 etc).
36
37
38 --
39 Mart Raudsepp
40 Gentoo Developer
41 Mail: leio@g.o
42 Weblog: http://planet.gentoo.org/developers/leio

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Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: language bindings as separate packages Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccreesh@××××××××××.com>