[gentoo-dev] Binary packages and revdep-rebuild

[Paul Varner]

One of the common complaints with revdep-rebuild is that it wants to
constantly rebuild binary packages (most notably openoffice-bin). To
assist in resolving this issue, I have released gentoolkit-0.2.1_pre9
which adds the capability for an ebuild maintainer to adjust how
revdep-rebuild behaves towards binary packages.

The latest revdep-rebuild allows the user to control the following
variables:

LD_LIBRARY_MASK  - Mask of specially evaluated libraries
SEARCH_DIRS      - List of directories to search for executables and
libraries
SEARCH_DIRS_MASK - List of directories to not search

With the capability that I just added, a package maintainer can now
adjust the same variables.  To use this capability do the following:

1. Install a file into /etc/revdep-rebuild (I'm using the same
convention as /etc/env.d and prefixing the files with a number)
2. Inside of the file, place the appropriate changes to the variables.

For example: I have the following
file /etc/revdep-rebuild/10openoffice-bin on my system

# openoffice-bin revdep-rebuild configuration file
SEARCH_DIRS_MASK="/usr/lib/openoffice"

3. revdep-rebuild will accumulate the variables in the following order:

environment, /etc/make.conf, /etc/revdep-rebuild/* 

This means that a user can override your changes if desired, but your
changes will be honored by default.

Finally, one other change that I am considering is to add a PACKAGE_MASK
variable that will only be read from the files in /etc/revdep-rebuild
and cannot be overridden by the user (except by editing the file).  The
purpose will be to tell revdep-rebuild to never attempt to rebuild that
package. Before I implement that I would like to get some feedback on if
that is a desired feature.

Regards,
Paul