Re: [gentoo-dev] [PATCH] 2022-12-24-alternatives-introduction: add news item

[Alexey Sokolov]

Russian translation attached

+Sergey to see any obvious mistakes

24.12.2022 11:34, Sam James пишет:
> Bug: https://bugs.gentoo.org/886247
> Bug: https://bugs.gentoo.org/886017
> Signed-off-by: Sam James <sam@g.o>
> ---
>   ...022-12-24-alternatives-introduction.en.txt | 92 +++++++++++++++++++
>   1 file changed, 92 insertions(+)
>   create mode 100644 2022-12-24-alternatives-introduction/2022-12-24-alternatives-introduction.en.txt
>
> diff --git a/2022-12-24-alternatives-introduction/2022-12-24-alternatives-introduction.en.txt b/2022-12-24-alternatives-introduction/2022-12-24-alternatives-introduction.en.txt
> new file mode 100644
> index 0000000..841e07a
> --- /dev/null
> +++ b/2022-12-24-alternatives-introduction/2022-12-24-alternatives-introduction.en.txt
> @@ -0,0 +1,92 @@
> +Title: Introduction of app-alternatives ebuilds
> +Author: Sam James <sam@g.o>
> +Posted: 2022-12-24
> +Revision: 1
> +News-Item-Format: 2.0
> +
> +Gentoo is introducing a new category of ebuilds called 'app-alternatives'
> +to handle cases where a symlink for a common binary may want to be switched
> +between different packages by a user.
> +
> +Traditionally, eselect was used for this, and while eselect still has its
> +place, it's unsuitable for cases like /bin/awk and /bin/sh because it
> +prevents immutable system directories and (more importantly
> +from a package management perspective) relies on orphaned symlinks which
> +means no package owns /bin/awk, /bin/sh, etc. This is not reliable and
> +can lead to dead symlinks (or no symlink at all) in some edge cases [0].
> +
> +Systems will be more robust and desired system configuration
> +can be achieved using the package manager rather than manual steps outside of it.
> +
> +The initial list of packages which support alternatives is as follows:
> +- app-alternatives/awk
> +- app-alternatives/bzip2
> +- app-alternatives/bc
> +- app-alternatives/cpio
> +- app-alternatives/gzip
> +- app-alternatives/lex
> +- app-alternatives/sh
> +- app-alternatives/tar
> +- app-alternatives/yacc
> +
> +The stabilization of these new ebuilds and packages depending
> +on them is ongoing in bug 886017 [1].
> +
> +## Per-upgrade requirements
> +
> +The default configuration on Gentoo systems is FEATURES="protect-owned"
> +which works similarly to FEATURES="collision-protect" but it allows
> +collisions between orphaned files. In this case, a one-off collision
> +occurs as the app-alternatives/ ebuilds begin to claim once-orphaned
> +symlinks.
> +
> +A similar issue occurred during the libxcrypt migration where users
> +had upgrades interrupted by using the older, more aggressive
> +FEATURES="collision-protect".
> +
> +It is recommended that users alter their configuration to
> +remove references to 'collision-protect' in FEATURES and instead either
> +explicitly enable 'protect-owned' in FEATURES or rely on the default
> +(equivalent). It is also acceptable to simply disable collision-protect
> +temporarily for the purposes of this news item.
> +
> +WARNING: Users with collision-protect enabled must disable FEATURES="collision-protect"
> +in /etc/portage/make.conf by removing it or setting FEATURES="-collision-protect"
> +if they have enabled it. collision-protect detects collisions between files including
> +orphaned files where no package owns the file.
> +
> +## Migrating
> +
> +To migrate your system, a standard world upgrade will suffice:
> +1. # emerge --sync
> +2. # emerge -a -uvDU @world (or other similar standard world upgrade command)
> +
> +## Configuration
> +
> +Users who are not interested in using different implementations for
> +various tools listed above can ignore this section.
> +
> +No configuration should be required by default, but users may wish
> +to configure the new app-alternatives/ ebuilds to their tastes as they
> +used to do via e.g. eselect-sh and eselect-awk.
> +
> +Going forward, /etc/portage/package.use will be used for this purpose.
> +
> +Users should review the USE flags available for the various app-alternatives
> +ebuilds like app-alternatives/sh and adjust their configuration as desired.
> +
> +For example, to have /usr/bin/gzip be provided by app-arch/pigz for automatic
> +parallelization of 'gzip', one would have the following in /etc/portage/package.use:
> +```
> +# https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gzip#Parallelization
> +# Make /usr/bin/gzip be a symlink to pigz for a speedup in compression
> +app-alternatives/gzip -reference pigz
> +```
> +
> +## Further reading
> +
> +For more details, please see the technical documentation on the wiki [2].
> +
> +[0] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Base/Alternatives#Why.3F
> +[1] https://bugs.gentoo.org/886017
> +[2] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Base/Alternatives

-- 
Best regards,
Alexey "DarthGandalf" Sokolov