Re: [gentoo-dev] Dynamic dependencies

[Ciaran McCreesh]

On Thu, 17 Sep 2015 20:14:59 +0100
Markos Chandras <hwoarang@g.o> wrote:
> could someone explain what the dynamic dependencies are in the context
> of portage and ebuilds? because that does seem to be something
> portage-internal specific in the way it handles changes in {,R}DEPEND
> without revbumps. Where is this thing documented in the first place?

Sometimes, Portage will sort of use the dependencies specified in an
ebuild rather than the dependencies specified in VDB for certain
operations under certain conditions and certain phases of the moon,
except when it doesn't. This is a quirk left over from the olden days,
when Portage could only handle the existence of one version of any given
package, and so couldn't cope with there being something called foo-1.2
in VDB and something else called foo-1.2 in the tree. This bug was
largely fixed when env saving meant that eclasses no longer had to
remain compatible with things in VDB, but traces of it still remain to
cause confusion.

-- 
Ciaran McCreesh