Re: [gentoo-dev] Re: Implicit system dependency

[Andrew Savchenko]

On Fri, 14 Nov 2014 10:03:27 -0800 Zac Medico wrote:
[...]
> >> Sorry Zac, I posted my reply before I read this.  This is essentially
> >> the point I was making.  However, I think this will be cumbersome.  With
> >> the current way we do things, its easy to delete packages from @system
> >> by just doing '-*sys-apps/man-pages' (for example) in a profile's
> >> packages file.  It is not so easy to delete from a DEPEND string, so I
> >> foresee some tricky if logic here.
> >
> > There is another drawback of using virtuals instead of @system set.
> > For old systems (in practical terms they are systems not updated
> > @world for more than several month) it is wise to update kernel,
> > @system and only afterwards whole @world.
> >
> > Virtuals will not catch updates in underlying packages if --deep is
> > not used and it can't be used, because some packages from @system
> > may indirectly depend on packages from @world (e.g. cairo, qt or
> > xorg) which will trigger half of the @world update with -D @system
> > which makes it impossible and impractical to use -D @system before
> > full @world update on old setups.
> >
> > We already have this problem with virtua/libc: it is not updated at
> > all, so when I run emerge -uav @system for the purposes described
> > above I have to manually add sys-devel/glibc to the list.
>
> There was a time long ago when portage actually behaved the way you want
> here. I implemented the behavior myself, but then I changed it to the
> way it is now because others complained that "virtuals should behave
> just like normal packages." We could certainly add an emerge option
> which would trigger the behavior that you want.

If this switch will be available, it would be great! And in such
case I don't mind for system->virtual switch for my profiles.
Moreover it would be great to have this switch even now to avoid
"glibc not updated with @system" issues.

Best regards,
Andrew Savchenko