Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Dynamic dependencies

[Rich Freeman]

On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 8:22 PM, Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@×××.net> wrote:
> So council was called in, and it asked the portage folks to take some
> steps that, portage development being what it is, had the effect of
> slowing down and delaying things for long enough that, hopefully, people
> have had time to come to terms with the changes, and with a bit of
> familiarity, see static-deps aren't so bad, after all.

To be clear, the only thing the council did was ask the portage team
to clarify whether they intended to make it a default, and to provide
a plan/policy for virtuals/eclasses/etc.  There was a lot of the usual
panic on the lists and it wasn't actually clear whether anybody
intended to change anything or if we were making a lot of ado over
just an idea.

The purpose of the discussions on-list are mostly to try to go ahead
and figure out what we want to do with virtuals/eclasses/etc so that
the portage team can make the change when they're ready.  My
understanding is that they're now fairly eager to do so, but perhaps a
bit gun-shy about dealing with all the likely bikeshedding.   So, a
few council members broached the subject so that people can throw
their stones at us and maybe wear themselves out.  In this way we also
protect our generous salaries by making the job sound even less
enviable than it must already seem.  :)

A year ago this got an huge outcry.  Of late I'm barely hearing a
whimper of protest.  I think that people have been dealing with broken
dependency resolution long enough with subslots now that they just
want to see the pain go away.  From what I've heard it hasn't been too
painful to disable dynamic deps, and I never really had issues with it
with paludis when I was using it.  I did take a look at the results of
an emerge --changed-deps world and it came out to 388 packages to
rebuild, much of it being kde.

-- 
Rich