Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: KDE, metapackages, and monolithic packages

[Paul de Vrieze]

On Monday 27 February 2006 00:05, Mike Myers wrote:
> Duncan wrote
>
> [deleted]
>
> Thanks a lot for the detailed explanation.
>
> Do you know if there's a way or going to be a way to handle the split
> ebuilds so that reemerging or unemerging a split ebuild will reemerge
> or unemerge the corresponding packages?  It seems like the ebuilds are
> only intended to make installing kde easier, which they do, but it
> doesn't make handle uninstalling or reinstalling a split ebuild very
> easy at all.  Like, if I had kde 3.4 installed and upgraded to 3.5 and
> no longer need 3.4, I can't just do 'emerge -C kde-meta-3.4', or
> something similar if it's the installed with the split metapackage. Or
> if I just wanted to remove some split ebuild, like say kdenetwork, but
> leave the rest, I couldn't do 'emerge -c kdenetwork-meta' to uninstall
> the related packages.
>
> Basically, my concern is that how KDE is installed is quite easily
> handled, but uninstalling or reinstalling is not equally as easy, at
> least in some aspects.
>
> I hope I explain myself well enough, and thanks for your response.

It is a problem that has been present in portage since the beginning. The 
problem is that portage does not do reverse dependency tracking. The idea 
should be that when kde-meta-3.4 is deleted, it finds that there is no 
package anymore that requested the kde-3.4 subpackages. And as such 
portage would delete them. Currently we can not fix this. It has to do 
with the reasons that depclean is "broken". One problem is that currently 
portage does not record which particular versions satisfy a dependency. 
As such removing packages that should not be used, may introduce problems 
with packages that have been linked against it.

Paul

-- 
Paul de Vrieze
Gentoo Developer
Mail: pauldv@g.o
Homepage: http://www.devrieze.net