Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Sets vs Meta ebuilds

[William L. Thomson Jr.]

On Sat, 8 Jul 2017 16:35:34 -0700
Zac Medico <zmedico@g.o> wrote:

> On Sat, Jul 8, 2017 at 4:09 PM, William L. Thomson Jr.
> <wlt-ml@××××××.com> wrote:
> > Sets are also used for package rebuilds, like x11-module-rebuild,
> > live-rebuild, and others.
>
> Usually there are better ways to trigger rebuilds.

Those have nothing to do with me, and I am not using sets for rebuild
purposes. Sets in a profile per my interest and topic have nothing to do
with rebuilding. Just pointing out others current usage of sets.

> For example, slot  operator dependencies for rebuilds due to subslot
> changes, and --newuse for USE changes.

Problem is portage does not catch all changes all the time. Many times
I will update world with binaries, Just to find out if I run without
binaries more packages need to be updated. 

However if there are no changes, and the user wants to rebuild. How do
they do that? Sets make it very easy.

> For live-rebuild, it would be
> much nicer to have a framework that automatically triggers rebuilds
> when upstream changes are detected, like smart-live-rebuild.

Which would require some sort of check to upstream to detect changes on
some interval. If the user wants to do that manually. How do they do
that? Sets make it very easy.

> We can add EAPI/PMS extensions that allow package managers to do what
> smart-live-rebuild does.

Will that allow a user to rebuild on demand for their own reasons with
no changes to system that are "detectable"?

Again rebuilding is not my interest in sets. That is others usage of
such. However they seem like they could serve a purpose in such
situations. Giving the user really fine grain control without having to
list a set of packages or mess with making various meta ebuilds.

-- 
William L. Thomson Jr.