Re: [gentoo-dev] HDEPEND (host dependencies for cross-compilation) for EAPI 5?

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Fri, 31 Aug 2012 14:11:38 -0700
Zac Medico <zmedico@g.o> wrote:
> On 08/31/2012 01:46 PM, Ciaran McCreesh wrote:
> > On Fri, 31 Aug 2012 13:03:00 -0700
> > What exactly would the rules be for handling a package that is in
> > both DEPEND and HDEPEND, when ROOT is in effect? Would the versions
> > be expected to match? What about use flags?
>
> For the sake of simplicity, I would treat them as entirely
> independent. It should be easy enough for users to apply manual
> configuration adjustments in order to resolve any conflicts of this
> nature that may arise. If there turns out to be a strong demand for
> additional constraints, we can consider adding them in a future EAPI
> (possibly using a combined DEPENDENCIES variable).

The thing is... Without some kind of "the same" constraint, we'd be
adding a feature which would probably work most of the time only by
coincidence.

> > Also, we're getting rather a lot of *DEPEND variables here... If
> > we're making people make major changes to their deps, which for
> > HDEPEND we definitely would be,
>
> Well, I not sure that "major changes" is a really good
> characterization. We're just talking about migrating a few things
> from DEPEND to HDEPEND, and it's not strictly required. The migration
> is only needed when fulfilling a request to support cross-compilation
> in a particular ebuild.

Where are you getting "a few" from? Is this "a few seems to be enough
to make it work", or "someone carefully analysed lots of packages to
work out exactly what dependencies are HDEPEND, and measured it"? I
strongly suspect we're in "works by coincidence" territory again --
"adding packages to HDEPEND as breakages are encountered" is a long way
from "having an accurate HDEPEND". Are we aiming for the former or the
latter?

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh