Re: [gentoo-dev] rfc: empty directories in ${D}

[Alec Warner]

On Thu, Mar 29, 2018 at 10:47 AM, Michał Górny <mgorny@g.o> wrote:

> W dniu czw, 29.03.2018 o godzinie 09∶39 -0500, użytkownik William Hubbs
> napisał:
> > All,
> >
> > I just happened to notice the following warning from portage when
> > bumping dhcpcd.
> >
> > > One or more empty directories installed to /var:
> > >  /var/lib/dhcpcd
> > > If those directories need to be preserved, please make sure to create
> > > or mark them for keeping using 'keepdir'. Future versions of Portage
> > > will strip empty directories from installation image.
> >
> > If we are going to require emptty  directories to be marked with
> > keepdir, I think we should hard fail the emerge rather than quietly
> > strip the empty directories. If we just strip the directories, this
> > will, more than likely, lead to broken packages. In the case of dhcpcd,
> > the upstream build system installs the /var/lib/dhcpcd directory, then
> > dhcpcd writes to the directory.
> >
>
> Are you saying that dozens of packages should suddenly start failing
> for users so that developers would feel more obliged to fix them?
> Provided that the packages are still maintained, and it won't be
> 'hey, we just made it impossible to install this package, maybe someone
> will fix it one day'.
>
>
I have a more concrete question regarding what the feature is trying to do,
and how it accomplishes it.

The problem seems to be that there are empty directories in ${D} that get
merged to the livefs but are not used.
These directories are either made by the ebuild directly (e.g. a bug in
Gentoo) or by upstream's build system (a bug upstream.)

Is there any particular reason we need to remove them?

We have elected (based on current portage) to warn people about empty
directories. If the goal is to remove the empty directories; this seems
reasonable; folks can then
figure out if the bug is in Gentoo, or Upstream[0], and submit a fix. The
struggle here comes where we want to do two sorts of activities.

1) Stop new bugs (e.g. by stripping empty directories and causing packages
to fail to work properly because the livefs is missing directories.)
2) Fix existing bugs (e.g. by warning folks.)

Ultimately this is what I feel like EAPI was made for; we could propose
stripping in EAPI7, and warning in all other EAPIs.

-A

[0] There is another issue whereby upstreams might not care about this bug,
or might introduce new bugs because they lack this QA mechanism. I tend to
be pessemistic on these efforts for this reason; now Gentoo has to carry
some Gentoo-only patches to fix this random "QA" problem, for what to me is
a minor benefit. Some upstreams will never merge these patches. So I'm
curious what the gain is?


--
> Best regards,
> Michał Górny
>
>
>