[gentoo-dev] binpkg (was: don't rely on dynamic deps)

[Martin Vaeth]

Patrick Lauer <patrick@g.o> wrote:
>
> Without binpkg support I'd feel the need to hack it up, just to get things
> fast enough.

binpkg support has some severe problems currently, anyway.
I already described it in the bug, but since perhaps the
description was not clear, I repeat it here:

I regularly build binpackages for some client.
This client is updated only very infrequently
(once every few months).

Of course, before I emerge the binpkgs, I update the
portage tree on that client, and also copy my
/etc/portage/package* directories.

Then it turns out that I can use *less* than half of
my binpkgs on the client: The binpkgs are just ignored.

One reason I found: I had temporarily set ~ARCH for some
package in /etc/portage/package.accept_keywords
when building the package, and removed the entry again
(and thus also on the client) once the package has become
stable. I hope that you agree that my expectation is
sane that the binpkg should be used anyway - but it isn't.

For others I do not know the reason, but probably it is
very similar that some variables/settings at the time
of building the package were different from the current
ones in the tree.

So, I do not know all the details, but currently
binpkg support is somewhat broken already.
What we would need is *more* pushing of information of
the current tree data to binpkgs, not *less*.
So dynamic deps (or another update mechanism)
appear to be a first step in *fixing* support for binpkgs...