Re: [gentoo-dev] RFC: splitting virtual/

[Michał Górny]

On Mon, 15 Aug 2011 19:42:01 -0700
Zac Medico <zmedico@g.o> wrote:

> On 08/15/2011 11:41 AM, Michał Górny wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > Now that we don't have any old-style virtuals in gx86 anymore,
> > I think the 'virtual' category is basically one another plain
> > category nowadays.
>
> In sys-apps/portage, the "virtual" category is used as a hint to the
> dependency resolver it needs to look ahead in order to make the best
> possible choices. For example, in order to solve bug #141118 [1], it
> recursively expands virtual/jre and virtual/jdk in order to
> efficiently satisfy a jre dependency with whatever jdk happens to be
> installed, instead of pulling in a redundant jre.

Isn't that another, ugly, non-PMS hack which makes people think they
are creating correct packages?

> > Considering the number of different virtuals in this category,
> > maybe it would be a good idea to split it a little? What I'm
> > proposing is maybe creating some kind of '*-virtual' categories.
> >
> > For example, half of the current virtuals are prefixed with 'perl-'.
> > Maybe they could be transformed into 'perl-virtual/*'?
>
> If you're going to do that, then I'd suggest giving them some sort of
> tag that the package manager can rely upon in order to identify them
> as virtuals. For example, we could have the ebuilds set
> PROPERTIES=virtual [2], or we could simply specify (in PMS) that any
> category whose name matches the '*-virtual' pattern will contain
> virtuals.

Doesn't DEFINED_PHASES==- serve that purpose nowadays?

> [1] http://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=141118
> [2]
> http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/msg_9d449a18a96a25a547fcfd40544085cf.xml



-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny