Re: [gentoo-dev] don't rely on dynamic deps

[Rich Freeman]

On Sun, Jul 27, 2014 at 5:27 PM, Kent Fredric <kentfredric@×××××.com> wrote:
>
> On 28 July 2014 08:56, Ciaran McCreesh <ciaran.mccreesh@××××××××××.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> > To me it seems like a simple data model bug that vdb does not get
>> > updated to reflect the new situation after step 2 above.
>>
>> Rewriting VDB won't help if the user doesn't sync at the right time.
>
> Indeed. pkgmove has this problem solved with a mass of quarterly move files,
> but I'm not sure I'd want to have

Does it matter?  If a user never syncs again, they'll have a broken
package (though portage won't realize it).  If they wait until the
package is removed from the tree before syncing then they'll still
have a broken package.  If the broken package happens to work for
them, then the user won't care, and if it doesn't work for them,
they'll sync in the updates one way or another (using an overlay if
necessary).

As far as I can tell, the only thing that is needed for this to work
is for portage to be able to detect when an installed package
dependency changes in the repository, and this could be facilitated by
metadata.  Maintainers would then revbump when a change can't be
correctly handled, and they won't revbump when it can be.

Do we have to guarantee that users who don't sync before a PV is
removed get all updates to that PV if they have it installed when they
eventually do sync?  If I have some package installed that was
treecleaned a year ago and it depends on udev then obviously it won't
know anything about the new virtual - we live with that already
without too many problems.  Bottom line is that bad things happen if
you hang onto packages that aren't maintained in some repository
(possibly your overlay maintained by yourself).

Rich