Re: [gentoo-dev] News item review: python-exec 2.3 reclaims python* symlinks

[Michał Górny]

On Sat, 21 Jan 2017 13:00:52 -0500
NP-Hardass <NP-Hardass@g.o> wrote:

> On 01/21/2017 04:49 AM, Michał Górny wrote:
> > Please review the following news item. It was requested by users.
> > Preferably I'd like to commit it today.
> >
> >  --
> >
> > Title: python-exec 2.3 reclaims python* symlinks
> > Author: Michał Górny <mgorny@g.o>
> > Content-Type: text/plain
> > Posted: 2017-01-21
> > Revision: 1
> > News-Item-Format: 1.0
> > Display-If-Installed: <app-eselect/eselect-python-20160206
> > Display-If-Installed: <dev-lang/python-exec-2.3
> >
> > The new versions of python-exec (2.3 and newer) are reclaiming multiple
> > Python-related symlinks in /usr/bin, most notably /usr/bin/python*. This
> > may result in your package manager reporting file collisions.
> >
> > The respective symlinks were previously either unowned and created
> > dynamically by app-eselect/eselect-python, or installed by it. From now
> > on, all Python-related symlinks are installed and handled
> > by python-exec. This ensures that they respect the python-exec
> > configuration files and variables consistently with regular Python
> > packages, and improves their reliability.
> >
> > If you are using FEATURES=collision-protect, Portage will reject
> > the upgrade. If this is the case, please temporarily switch to
> > FEATURES=protect-owned for the upgrade.
> >
> > If you are using FEATURES=protect-owned, Portage will verbosely warn
> > about the file collisions but will proceed with the upgrade once
> > determining no replaced files are owned. Please disregard the warning.
> >
> > The potentially colliding files are:
> >
> >  * /usr/bin/2to3
> >  * /usr/bin/pydoc
> >  * /usr/bin/python
> >  * /usr/bin/python2
> >  * /usr/bin/python3
> >  * /usr/bin/python-config
> >
> > For more information on python-exec, please see:
> > https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Python/python-exec
>
> Personally, I'd like to see an explicit, one liner on how to remediate
> in the case of collision-protect since I think it is default for several
> profiles.  Additionally, it'd be unwise to disable collision-protect for
> more than just the affected packages.  Something like
>
> If you are using FEATURES=collision-protect, Portage will reject the
> upgrade.  If this is the case, please temporarily switch to
> FEATURES=protect-owned for the upgrade, like with:
> FEATURES=protect-owned emerge -1 '=python-exec-2.3'
>
> Or similar.  this way, the user is only going to be disabling
> collision-protect for this one package, lest it cause issues like if the
> user edits their make.conf and them emerges @world

This is not that simple since it's a lock-step upgrade of python-exec +
eselect-python. And it requires all versions of Python upgraded first.
Since protect-owned is the default, I don't see a major issue with
telling people to enable it for complete upgrade.

In other words, if you're using collision-protect, you should be able
to deal with the fallout. The news item purely informs you that those
collisions are safe to accept.

-- 
Best regards,
Michał Górny
<http://dev.gentoo.org/~mgorny/>